Tristan Kennedy on the highs and lows of road trips – and exactly what equipment you need to bring to enjoy them all
By Tristan Kennedy
It’s the book that launched a thousand road trips. But like many of the travel stories it went on to inspire, Jack Kerouac’s supposedly autobiographical novel On the Road involves a healthy dose of embellishment, exaggeration and outright invention. Even the generally accepted account of its creation is full of falsehoods.
Everybody knows the story of Kerouac bashing it out in a single, unpunctuated paragraph over the course of three sleepless weeks, fuelled by nothing but his own youthful genius and regular doses of Benzedrine. Far fewer people know that he actually made significant edits before it was published, that his first draft, like the final book, follows pretty much all the conventional rules of punctuation, or that the strongest drug Kerouac took while writing was coffee.
I found myself recalling this discrepancy recently, while doom-scrolling through Instagram, where I stumbled on the inevitable posts about #VanLife. Kerouac quotes – usually superimposed over generic-looking highway photos – are, of course, an essential part of any self-respecting #VanLifer’s presence on the grid. But it wasn’t just the hackneyed repetition of the author’s most Instagrammable lines that reminded me of his work. His influence loomed large in every single post I came across – whether the influencers realised it or not.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that there’s an equivalence between 21st-century Instagrammers and Jack Kerouac. Posting a few, heavily filtered pictures of your VW Transporter conversion is hardly the same as writing the Great American Novel. But if he were still alive today, the Beat writer would surely recognise the combination of embellishment, exaggeration and outright invention employed by these latter-day imitators. He would also, no doubt, be amused by the continuing popularity of road trip content (17 million posts on Instagram and counting) almost 75 years after On the Road was published, at the height of the automobile age.
For all the fakery involved in many accounts of life on the road, there’s still something undeniably romantic about road trips in general – and campervan trips in particular. I know this because when we got married two years ago, my wife and I decided to take two separate campervan trips for our honeymoon. For the first, we drove our own car, a Citroen Berlingo minivan, around the Balkans. With a paddle board strapped to the roof and our climbing gear stashed in the back, we island-hopped our way down the Croatian coast, sleeping in the shade of olive trees at night and swimming or deep-water soloing by day. When we reached Split, we turned east into Bosnia and Herzegovina. We jumped into the river under the Mostar bridge and went hiking in the hills around Mount Trebevic before losing ourselves in the bazaars, bars and clubs of Sarajevo – one of the buzziest nightlife spots in Europe.
Our second trip took us to Marrakesh. There, we rented a full-blown RV (for a fraction of the price it would have cost in Europe) and drove west towards the coast, spending a couple of days surfing the point break at Insoumane before heading south to Agadir and east into the Sahara. We’d pick each day’s destination by browsing Google Earth but often deviate at the last minute – spotting an 11th-century kasbah, an enticing-looking beach, or an ancient Berber cave dwelling from the highway, and bouncing off down a dirt track to explore. We occasionally slept in campsites, but more often parked up at random points by the roadside, where farmers would occasionally knock on our door in the morning, offering us tea and breakfast.
At least, those are my stories of those trips. The reality, of course, involved lots of moments that were less romantic: our air mattress deflating completely during our second night in Croatia, for example, which left us flopping around in the back of the Berlingo like fish out of water, as we tried to get comfortable enough to sleep. Or the time I messed up emptying the RV’s chemical toilet in a campsite east of Agdz, and managed to cover the entire bathroom in a week’s worth of semi-dissolved sewage.
These experiences were, at least, instructive. I learned that the better prepared you are – and the better your equipment – the more enjoyable life on the road becomes. The Balkan road trip got a lot easier once we’d stopped at a Croatian camping-supplies shop and kitted ourselves out with a slightly more robust air mattress, as well as a few kitchen essentials. When we upgraded our wheels in Morocco, we discovered that spending ten days in a fully specced-out RV was infinitely easier than camping in the back of our own car – despite that unfortunate incident with the chemical toilet. Basically, if you get the right gear, your campervan experience is likely to be closer to the idealised #VanLife you see online.
These two honeymoon campervan trips also taught me lessons that have nothing to do with romance versus reality. Waking up each morning without necessarily knowing where you’ll be sleeping that night is an incredibly liberating feeling, as is having the freedom to go wherever you choose, whenever you choose. Road trips, I learned, are fun even when they’re not viewed through the rose-tinted specs of selective memory, or the heavily filtered photos of other people’s Instagram feeds. You don’t need to post clichéd Kerouac quotes to make road trips feel epic. Nor do you have to be a writer of his quality to turn them into great stories. The warts-and-all reality of road-tripping, it turns out, is usually romantic enough, just as it is.
Wishlist – Three items that will make campervan trips better
The Essential: Petzl Tikka Core headlamp – £58
A decent headlamp is essential for any kind of camping trip, and campervan trips are no exception. You can get all kinds of plug-in lights for your car battery, but if you’re going to be cooking, washing up in a nearby stream, or just wandering off into the woods for a wee, having your own independent light source is essential. The Tikka Core, which we’ve used for about six months now, casts 450 lumens of brightness. The battery charges on a USB, making it incredibly convenient, and it has a red light setting, so you won’t dazzle your vanlife partner when you wake up in the night. petzl.com
Click here to get yours via Amazon
The Surprisingly Useful: Arc’Teryx Kragg slip-on shoe – £140
No matter where you park your campervan, you’ll want some sort of easy-on, easy-off shoe. There’s nothing worse than sandy, muddy or wet footprints inside the van. Flip flops will often do the job, but there are times when you want something a little bit warmer and more supportive. Enter the Kragg from Arc’Teryx. Designed for climbers, who don’t want to choose between a flimsy sandal and a heavy approach shoe, these lightweight, Vibram-soled slippers are perfect for campsites of all kinds, and ideal for car camping in particular. Unlike flip flops, you can drive in them and hike rugged trails in them, but they’re still breathable enough for hot days, and light enough to squash into a backpack with ease. arcteryx.com
Click here to get yours via Amazon
The Luxury: Uranus Wiper carbon neutral toilet paper – £38
Okay, so toilet paper is an essential, but this is no ordinary toilet paper. Made of sustainably grown bamboo, it’s produced using a process that’s entirely carbon neutral in a factory powered by biomass, with zero waste water run-off. For £38, you get a box of 48 rolls, meaning this doesn’t cost the Earth, either literally or figuratively. Lots of brands like to talk up their eco-credentials but Uranus Wiper have really done their homework. They’ve examined every step of the manufacturing and shipping process to minimise the impact of what is perhaps the ultimate single use product. uranuswiper.co.uk
