Sven and I met each other in the summer of 2001 at a party and it was love at first sight. A few days later on my 18th Birthday he completely stole my heart by surprising me with 18 red roses. Ever since that day we’ve been together almost every day.

For our first holiday together we drove to Spain in Sven’s car and stayed in a hotel. The year after we wanted to be a little more adventurous so we bought a tent and stayed on a beautiful little camping ground by the beach somewhere in Spain.

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We really caught the traveling virus a few years later when Sven saw an old Volkswagen van for sale, he came to pick me up to go see it and I also fell in love with it. It completely fitted into the hippie period we were in at the time.

So we bought it and made it ready to travel. It was quite a project… we completely furnished it (in hippie-style ofcourse) and put in another engine ourselves.

As it turned out later it was not the best purchase, we had a lot of trouble getting it to drive properly. But despite our inexperienced and impulsive purchase, our Volkswagen van provided us with a lot of great and also horrible moments (I’ll spare you the details) but especially great memories. And thanks to our faulty van we got to meet friends for life and it sparked our sense of adventure even more.

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Every free moment we had we spent traveling. Short trips, long trips and festivals… in the neighbourhood or further away, in summer and in winter. We were at our happiest when we were traveling.

 

It got a little more difficult when I started working and had less free time while Sven was still studying. All the short trips during my first working year could not fulfil our traveling desire so we decided to go on a road trip of three months the year after. As expected I could not get leave from work for this long so we saved some money and I quit my job. I would find another job when we got back. We also decided to buy another van because the Volkswagen had let us down to many times. We searched for a cheap second-hand van and got it ready to start our road trip. It was not as pretty as our first van, but it was bigger, more comfortable and it took us all the way to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Swiss. It was an unforgettable voyage. And when we got home I got my old job back.

 

In the years after we made a lot of road trips with our van, like our yearly trip to Amsterdam on Sven’s birthday, our yearly visit to our friends in Swiss, a lot of festival visits, weekends away with friends, …

Once Sven graduated and started working too we could save some money and we decided to buy our first real camper van. An old Hymer, the cheapest one they had. But it was so much more comfortable to travel in and it was always packed and ready to go.

 

In 2009 we got married and the year after we went (with me being pregnant in the meantime) on our honeymoon to Jamaica. Right before our honeymoon Sven’s father invited us on a trip to New York and Orlando. It was amazing and this is probably where our desire to travel the world arose. We had already spent so many years road tripping in Europe, now we wanted more.

 

In the summer of 2010 our first son Liam was born and we took him on his first road trip to Spain when he was 2 months old. Unfortunately we had car trouble again… our camper van broke down. We got it fixed and sold it immediately when we got home.

And we decided that our next big holiday in 2011 would be back to Florida, our last trip there was so amazing that we decided to go back for 3 weeks. We left our baby son in the caring hands of his grandparents.

While we were planning on having a second baby and buying a house because our apartment was getting a little small for our future family of four, our traveling plans faded a little bit to the background.

Except for our trip to China in 2012. Sven had quit his job to start his own business and he needed to go to China for research, although I was pregnant with Sky then, I decided to go along.

 

Later that year Sky was born and also he got to go on holiday when he was just a few months old. We rented a cabin in France and went there by car. We had a nice holiday but 2 little children in a car was not ideal, so we bought our second camper van, another second hand Hymer. After all we did not have the time and money to travel the world at this moment, so we would continue road tripping through Europe with our children.

 

All of this changed in 2017… The children were going to school now so we could only go on vacation during the school holidays. During one of the school holidays in February we took a last-minute flight to Spain because we were so tired of the bad weather in Belgium, we needed a week of sun to recharge our batteries. We rented an apartment in the east of Spain and stayed there for a week.

AND we fell in love! Moving to Spain is something we always wanted to do and talked about a lot but it never seemed the right moment to do it. Until then! It’s never the right moment if you don’t make it the right moment. So we decided in that week that we would really go for it this time. We contacted a real estate agency and drove back to Spain with our camper in April (the next school holiday) to look for houses. We found one… and bought it. So in July 2017 we moved to Spain. We had the most amazing time there; I still love our home very much. But this is also the place where our love for sailing began. Our neighbours invited us to go on a sailing trip to Ibiza and that’s how we met Carlo, the captain of the sailing boat. The trip to Ibiza was so much fun that we did it over with our family on my birthday and Sven arranged to take sailing lessons later with Carlo. Sven got all into sailing and he showed me a lot of amazing sailing videos on YouTube. And that’s how the idea arose to buy a sailing boat. We talked about it a lot, did a lot of research and even though the idea scared me sometimes, it sounded like an amazing experience. So we went to a boat show in France and decided pretty fast that a Lagoon 46 would be the boat for us. We would have to wait until the summer of 2020 until we could pick up the boat. So since september 2020 we are living on our catamaran: Nohma.

 

 

This was our story and the main events that led us to where we are today. We’ve been happy together for over 20 years now and we plan on making the next years even more unforgettable.