I sat down - accompanied by an old lady groan - having just completed this epic six-month hike that took me from Mexico to Canada whilst serving out mandatory fortnight in quarantine in an isolated converted stable far from mankind. It was my intention to write ‘at least three chapters’ before I was allowed to re-orientate myself back into the civilisation during the period known as “lockdown”.

Sheer exhaustion, combined with some heavy jetlag, meant I wrote a paragraph and a half. Thankfully, walking across America did not permanently damage my hands, and lockdown meant that there was not much else to do but sleep and type. I was so done with walking, I eschewed the authorised one perambulation per day.

It took me six months to convert my diary of notes, proliferated with self-pity, to emphasise how miserable I felt, how hard hiking uphill was, how painful my knees were, and how terrified I was into something people might want to read about. As I re-read my innermost thoughts, it struck me that my mind had followed the same steady path that it had when I embarked on the twelve steps of recovery. And that is why I brought my two healing worlds together into this book.

I can safely say that writing the book was nearly as challenging as doing the walk! The there was just as much swearing, fearing and frustration involved. 

It knocked my socks off when the reviews came in - giving it a tremendously healthy 4.6 stars on Amazon and Good Reads. Thank you for taking the time to buy, comment, rate and recommend!

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I’d first discovered that “Van Life” was a real thing in the pandemic and was quite fascinated by the challenge of it.

Before I realised it, I found there were loads of women buying converted vans and campers going off on their own and revelling in their experiences. This alone convinced me to give it a try - after all, it is a well known fact of women’s lives that we find doing stuff on our own either scary or we feel terribly self-conscious. 

Once I got underway, I realised that I knew very little about my own country. In part because I have spent the vast majority of my life since a young age living overseas. Even when I was here I was locked up in a boarding school, confined to just a few rooms, static views and a plethora of rules and regulations. It was a suffocating, harrowing and hideous way of being brought up.

Moreover, almost all cultural and historical recounts of our fine lands are about war, war and more war. I noticed that hardly ever were women and women’s lives mentioned, and if they were, it was as a foot-note, or done cack-handedly, like “Women can be pirates too” to shoehorn us into men’s history. I wanted to explore my heritage - the stuff that shapes the English women’s psyche. 

That’s why as I recount my adjustment to “Van Life”, I wove in the Englishwomen’s legacies and cultures, as well as some of the more illuminating experiences of being sent away to boarding school very young, and the psychological impact of such an upbringing.  

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