We ran a café for seven years. The discipline of using everything and wasting nothing is baked into how we cook. The van is simply the purest expression of that philosophy – small fridge, two hobs, and the requirement that every ingredient earns its place across more than one meal. This is how we do it.

We had been researching campervans for months without ever spending a night in one. So we hired one for a bank holiday weekend in Cornwall. One clifftop pitch, one Cornish sunset, one notebook full of decisions. We drove home certain. This is the trip that started everything.

Two test drives, a deposit we nearly talked ourselves out of, a dealer with folded arms, and the phone call that changed everything. The complete honest account of how we found our van – including the broker fees nobody warns you about and why hiring first was the best decision we made.

The phone call on the morning of a memorial service. A forecourt in Somerset in our best clothes. A first night that involved clowns in boxing gloves. And the question nobody thinks to ask before they buy: where are you actually going to put it?

Rain, wind, a water tank that refused to fill for reasons that took an embarrassingly long time to work out, and a heating system that turned out to be completely magnificent. Our second night in the van – everything we got wrong and one thing that was brilliant.

Two dead batteries, a hotel breakfast we will never speak of again, a man with a 150 decibel voice, a Christmas bug, a night alone in minus three without her glasses, and a Boxing Day tractor rally that nobody mentioned. Not quite the festive trip we had imagined.

A laminated map, drywipe pens, a weather app, and absolutely no idea what we were doing. The apps, the route, the Crit Air vignette, the Animal Health Certificate, the Campingaz adaptor and everything else we wish someone had told us before we left.

We drove 2,500 miles from Cornwall to the south of France in January in a fifteen-year-old van with an anxious dog. Here are ten things we discovered – some of them the hard way, most of them in ways that made us laugh afterwards. All of them genuinely useful.

The hookup cable. The burned baguette. The nearly-broken tooth. The dog who ate better than we did. An honest account of everything that went sideways on our first France trip – documented so you can learn from ours rather than your own.

Our van didn't have a name when we set off. She found one two weeks into our first France trip, on a hillside near Saint-Tropez, the morning after our first wild camp. A chance conversation with a security guard, a woman who spent her whole life loving this landscape, and a name that arrived with no discussion required.

I feel the cold in the bone-deep, physiological, this-is-simply-who-I-am sense. I am the person who wears socks to bed in August. So when people ask whether you can really sleep comfortably in a van in January in France – here is exactly, specifically, everything we did. The sleep hat alone is worth the price of admission.

His full name is Hufflepuff. He is anxious, opinionated, completely beloved, and has been with us on every trip. Here is everything we have learned about taking a dog in a campervan or motorhome – including the food import rules for France, the legal seatbelt requirements, and the GPS tracker that will one day save you forty minutes of genuine fear.