Welcome to our blog.

We’re Lucy & Ben, and over the past four years we’ve travelled to 28 countries across Western, Central and Eastern Europe, delving into local cultures and cuisines and documenting our adventures through photography, writing and video.

While Ben directs and edits the videos, Lucy does most of the writing. We both photograph and we both have a passion for travel. We've been mates for seven years and partners for five. Partners? You might ask. Yes, partners; partners in crime, partners in work... Life partners in general.⁣

We met on the same photography course at university back in 2013 and now we live in a van together. Crazy, right? Neither of us knew anything about vans when we met but just look at us now. We were the only two to graduate our course and we're usually the only two still left on the dance floor at 5am. 

It took us 10 months to turn our rusty LDV minibus into a rusty LDV campervan and we love it to pieces- literally. We've travelled through 28 countries across Europe and that's only the start of our worldwide adventures.⁣ In 2020 our LDV Convoy was retired, but in 2021 we brought it out of retirement to film a TV program about hot springs for Japanese state TV- no, really!

Over the past 3½ years we’ve been renovating and converting a 1979 Bedford CF barn find which we’ve converting into a campervan to hire out and fund our dream of travelling full time. You can watch the entire build series on our YouTube channel, and we’ve even done a van tour too.

Our photography is the main drive for our travels, and the van is purely a vessel. Over the past few years we’ve undertaken many photo documentary projects around the Balkans, covering topics such as people living in extraordinarily remote locations in Albania (Outlands, 2018 and Outlands II, 2020), the traditional horse-mounted herdsmen of Hungary (Csikós of the Síkság, 2019) and the Roma gypsy settlers of Romania (Fringes, 2019). These projects can be viewed on our L&B Journals website.

In addition to meeting local people and telling their stories, we’ve come to be known online for our penchant for hot springs and dangerous roads, having visited over 30 hot springs across the continent and pushing our van to drive the most challenging roads it can handle. In our travelogues on YouTube we like to document not just the beautiful views and chance encounters with locals, but the difficulties that often arise with travelling in an old vehicle, and try to share a more authentic travel experience with our followers.

Where will we go next? No idea. Actually, we have too many ideas, and not enough funds, but we’re working on that. All we know right now is we’ll be converting a new van soon to accompany us on our adventures beyond Europe and across the world.

What’s here?

On this website we want to share with you a series of short vignettes and anecdotes from our travels on our Blog page. We’ll share the innermost details of how we built our van in the Build section, and how we’ll be building future vans using the knowledge we’ve acquired and the lessons we’ve learned.

You can find some of our work for sale over in our Shop; we have both photographic and digital prints, and a selection of handcrafted stickers we know will look great on your van.

If you want to collaborate, or just find out a little more about us, you can do this in the Work with us section of our website.

Want to support us?

If you want to support us, you can subscribe to our channel on YouTube, or follow us on Instagram, or Facebook. We love hearing from you, even if it’s just a quick hello or asking for advice, so drop us a DM or send us an email. If you really like us and want to support what we do and help us to continue creating content, you can join us on Patreon too.

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