Overland Adventures with Dogs – World Wide Walkies

The World Wide Walkies Crew

Hi – we’re Mark and Jackie Lambert, British nationals, both now in our sixties. We have been on the road full time since 2016, with our four cuddly Cavapoos, (Cavalier/Poodle cross) Kai, Rosie, Ruby and Lani.

We travelled for 5 years in a caravan (RV trailer), and since 2021, have been at large in a 24.5-tonne 6×4-wheel-drive self-converted army truck.

Life Chapter 1

For 32 years, Mark was a logistics manager in the principal UK hub of an international courier company. It was a fast moving and stressful job. Each day started and ended in the wee small hours, with thousands of tonnes of packages to be sorted, connected, and shipped worldwide.

Minutes mattered. Planes don’t wait, and customers demand pre-9 a.m. deliveries. For Mark, a two-minute delay was a performance black mark. Five minutes was a fail.

I (Jackie) graduated in biochemistry and worked in medical research, as a beer taster, then as a European sales specialist in scientific instrumentation, which involved extensive travel in the US and Europe.

But a salesperson is only as good as their last sale. Every month, my figures reverted to zero and had to achieve and surpass my target.

For both of us, the more successful we were, the higher our targets!

I was always an adventurer, preferring rough and tumble with my brothers to more arguably ‘feminine’ pursuits. In my single days, before I met Mark, I had an adventure epiphany in 1994. I booked a solo holiday, ‘Rafting the Zambezi: The River of the Gods’, because Africa was a new continent and it sounded fun.

I didn’t realise it meant facing the biggest white water in the world, crocodiles, hippos, and tropical diseases. It was terrifying, exhilarating, and taught me that life should be more than eat:work:sleep:repeat.

I returned and asked my boss for ‘maternity leave’.

“But Jackie, you don’t even have a boyfriend!” he replied.

“That’s the beauty of it. I’m not bothering with childbirth. I just want a year off to backpack around the world, then have my job back when I come home…”

He was so surprised, he said, “Yes!”

Mark and I met a few years later in 1999. In our first ever conversation, he said, “I want to go whitewater rafting!” to which I replied, “I am the Whitewater Rafting Queen!”

By then, besides the Zambezi, I had travelled to three more continents to raft some of the world’s biggest rivers.

We clearly had something in common, and 37 days later, Mark proposed.

37 weeks after this first meeting, we were married on the rocks outside a Scottish lighthouse. We spent our honeymoon dancing on volcanoes, zip lining, and whitewater rafting in Costa Rica.

In 2024, we celebrated our silver wedding.

Not bad for a whirlwind romance and a marriage that started on the rocks.

Fate Took Over

Besides a love of whitewater rafting, another fortunate thing we have in common is that we’re not materialistic. We both value experiences over owning STUFF, so we were always happy to save, not spend. That said, we lived for adventure and time away.

The holiday fund was the only part of our budget that was sacrosanct. Throughout our working lives, the house rule was that, even if it was only a weekend away, we could never return home from one trip without another in the diary.

Our dream was always to quit work and do more of what we loved: skiing, windsurfing, cycling, hiking – and owning dogs. Long hours and long commutes made pet ownership impossible, but we saved, downsized and invested, and moved to the coast. We sold our house, and bought two apartments: one to live in, one to let and give us an income.

We came up with many plans, but fear makes it hard to step off the cliff. The golden handcuff of a comfortable lifestyle afforded by two good incomes is tough to relinquish voluntarily.

Of course, we subscribed to the idea of that rolling 5-year plan… “In 5 years, we will have saved enough to stop working…” but that fifth year never quite arrived. We justified our cowardice with: “Another year’s salary is a bigger financial safety net…”

Our red line was a vague notion to retire when Mark reached the age of 55, and could cash in a quarter of his private pension tax free. But in 2015, Fate decided for us.

Aged 51 and 53, we were both made redundant.

It was terrifying.

“We haven’t saved enough!” we panicked.

Neither of us had ever involuntarily been without a good salary coming in. Besides losing 3 years’ joint income and savings potential, we couldn’t touch Mark’s pension for another 3 years.

What would we do?

Something Had to Change

But by that time, we were both suffering from extreme corporate burnout and the stress of the redundancy process. Even if we could find a company keen to employ redundant over 50s, we knew we could never go back to the corporate world.

We had no choice but to find an alternative. 

Around this time, we also lost a few friends. One, a decade younger than us, just sat up in bed one morning, keeled over and died.

It made us realise that waiting for tomorrow to live our dream life was a risky strategy, because there is no certainty that tomorrow will come.

Luck = Planning + Opportunity

In 2012, we went on a windsurfing holiday in Quiberon, Brittany, France, with the Seavets – the Senior and Veteran Windsurfing Association. We brought down the club’s average age by decades.

One morning as we rolled out of our tent, we asked Keith, a sprightly wetsuit-clad 80-year-old, “Are you just going out windsurfing?”

“I’ve already been,” he replied. “I sailed across the bay and had breakfast!”

None had come to Brittany from home. In a selection of caravans and motorhomes, they regaled us with tales of travel, of winters in Spain, or in the Alps, with windsurfing and skiing on tap.

Chatting to them caused a germ of an idea to form: the California dream of heading into the sunset in a camper with surf boards on our roof.

One of them, Steve, invited us to the Caravan and Motorhome Show, the UK’s biggest recreational vehicle trade show. We figured if we went to look, we could identify which models we liked, and could look out for them second hand in a few years. When we were ready to retire.

But the show spelled the end of our California dream.

We discovered there ain’t no motorhome big enough to fit all our toys – windsurfers, SUPs (Stand Up Paddle Boards), skis, and bikes.

To our horror, we realised our future was a caravan (RV trailer).

A Wobble Box. A Rolling Roadblock. A Tin Tent!

It was the antithesis of cool, but for us, it was the sensible choice.

• We already had a tow vehicle: our panel van/toy box and surf bus, Big Blue, which could carry all our playthings and provide a practical runaround for shopping trips and sightseeing.
• It was a third of the cost of even the most entry-level motorhome. We saw this saving as a year we wouldn’t need to work.
• Mark could stand up in a caravan. He is 6’6” (2 m) tall – incompatible with most motorhome interiors! 

We even found a model of caravan we liked: a Bailey Unicorn Vigo, with huge picture windows at the front which let light and the views flood in, and a transverse bed equal to Mark’s lanky stature.

For years, we’d saved hard and monitored our spending. We knew exactly how much money we needed to survive.

I can’t say both losing our jobs at the same time looked like good luck, but opportunity is in the eye of the beholder.

And at least when this backhanded opportunity knocked, we had done a little bit of planning.

Life Chapter 2

Drunken conversations change lives.

One caused comedian Tony Hawks to hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge to win a £100 bet. He wrote a book about it, and it became a Times bestseller, sparked more quirky adventures, and further books, two of which are now movies.

Another led Mark and I to rent out our apartment, sell most of what we own, and hit the road in a caravan we’d bought accidentally earlier that day.

We’d just gone out to ‘have a look’ at a miniature Knaus Sportcaravan, and swung by the Bailey dealers on the way home to compare the two. By 5 p.m., we were the proud owners of a 1-year-old Bailey Unicorn Vigo, acquired by the dealer the previous day, and as yet unadvertised. We named her ‘Kismet’ – ‘Fate’.

We celebrated our ridiculous impulse purchase by drinking a bit too much. Our inebriated conversation went a bit like this:

“We could rent out the house, live in the caravan, and go on a road trip!”

“Yeah. We’ve always wanted to travel.”

“It’s a cheap lifestyle. Maybe we could manage without working?”

“Perhaps. But if we needed to top up our funds, we could always get a seasonal job in the horrible months before Christmas. The Post Office takes on loads of people then…”

We were complete newbies who had never owned a leisure vehicle of any kind, so of course, once we sobered up, we realised it was a stupendous idea. Within a month, we’d packed our lives into our box on wheels, and were on a ferry to France.

Our plan: To Boldly Go Where No Van Has Gone Before.

Up Sides and Down Sides – We Created a Monster!

Our original plan to travel for 3 years has transformed into a love affair with nomadic life: the freedom, the thrill of unknown destinations, cultural immersion, and meeting a hugely diverse range of people.

It is indeed an inexpensive lifestyle, so we have managed financially on our rental income and savings with no need to work.

However, for us, the ultimate benefit of our lifestyle is that it slows down time. People obsess about their health, and how to live longer, but routine is the thief of time.

The absence of routine stretches time.

If you think how quickly two working weeks fly by compared to a fortnight’s holiday, you may understand what I mean. What Mark and I did a few months ago seems like a distant memory, because every day is different, and crammed with fresh sights and new experiences.

The principal drawback of our lifestyle is that we have created a monster! Lockdowns, family illness, or property maintenance have occasionally forced us to stay in one place for a while. It’s a novelty at first, but within weeks, we are itching to resume our travels.

That said, in the last year, we have suffered from ‘travel fatigue’. Since we moved into The Beast, we have changed the way we travel. We stay off grid more, often in less developed countries. We have found moving on every day or two, and the constant task of finding facilities and places to stay exhausting.

We’re lucky that our closest friends are adventurous, and many have flown out to meet us or we make sure our paths cross on our travels. We don’t have kids, and our parents have now passed away, so we have fewer family commitments than most.

When our parents were alive, we had to balance their needs and ours. Other family members were on hand, so we knew they had the care and company they needed. We sent postcards, telephoned weekly, visited whenever we were in the UK, and took solace from the knowledge that in case of emergency, we were never more than a few hours’ flight away – something we did have to put into practice a couple of times.

Life Chapter 2.1: Overlanding Adventures With Dogs

Phase 2.1 of our travels started on Friday 13th December 2019, when a landslide election win for Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister made Brexit – Britain’s Exit from the European Union (EU) – inevitable.

As part of the EU, British citizens had the freedom of unlimited visa-free travel in Europe’s Schengen area – 26 countries and counting.

Brexit spelled the end of that.

Mark and I needed a Brexit Busting Plan.

On that day, I uttered some life-changing words: “That’s it. Let’s go to Mongolia. THAT’S not in Schengen!”

Although she had given us safe conduct over the Carpathian Mountains, along a footpath and two cornfields in Romania, the Gobi Desert was a step too far for our trusty caravan, Kismet.

Exactly a month later, we purchased The Beast, a 24.5-tonne 6×4 wheel drive ex-army truck sight unseen off the internet. Our plan: to convert her into a rugged off-grid tiny home-on-wheels fit for our expedition to Mongolia.

At 10 metres long and nearly 4 metres high, with a 15-tonne payload (and 70-tonne towing capacity) we had no worries about storage, space, or weight constraints.

At the time, we were in Italy. Mark repatriated her from Rotterdam to the UK the day before the coronavirus pandemic broke and Italy locked down.

Fortunately, he got back to Italy in time for us to sit out the pandemic together.

Unfortunately, we’ve not yet made it to Mongolia.

Significant geopolitical unrest, borders still closed since the pandemic, and Vladimir Putin invading our route mean we’re still in Europe for now. However, we have got to know our Beast in brief barks around Britain, the Balkans, and the Baltics.

Where Are We Now?

We’re currently in the Italian Alps to ski for 3 months.

Post Brexit, that’s the longest we can stay! 

What Will We Do Next?

To us, the only purpose of a plan is to know what we’re deviating from.

Later this year, we may explore Norway, or we may go to Spain and Morocco.

We have also hatched another Brexit Busting Plan to apply for a French long-stay ‘D’ visa. If successful, it would enable us to stay in France without it counting towards our 90-days in Schengen, thus extending the time we can stay in Europe.

My Advice to Others Considering a Nomadic Retirement

If travel is what you really want to do, do it.

You don’t have to throw all your cards in the air like we did – you could hire a motorhome, and travel for a few months to see how you like it. That is possibly the sensible approach. However, I warn that over-thinking is a slippery slope to talking yourself out of taking action.

You might gather from reading this that Mark and I are impulsive and tend to jump in with both feet, confident that whatever happens, we will always find a solution.

It’s natural to feel worry or fear when taking a risk or making a huge change, but our experience shows that most of what you worry about never happens.

When we retired early, we were terrified we wouldn’t survive financially, but in fact, the opposite is true. Because we have spent so little in the last 9 years, our savings have not reduced significantly. We’re certainly no worse off than if we’d continued with our conventional life.

Yet, instead of being wage slaves, squandering our time and health on the hamster wheel of creating wealth for others, we have enjoyed almost a decade of rich experience while we’re still young and fit enough to enjoy it.

As a crumb of comfort, I have many friends who have pursued their dreams of travel or moving abroad. None have ever expressed one iota of remorse about their decision. Most (including us) regret only that they didn’t do it sooner.

I think there’s a lesson in that.

The road to regret lies in the things you didn’t do.

Not what you did.

<<<Author Bio>>>

Jacqueline (Jackie) Lambert is a full-time nomad, dogmother, and award-winning travel writer. She is a doggie/travel blogger at www.WorldWideWalkies.com and www.JMLambertAuthor.com. Since quitting work, she has independently published seven comic memoirs. Her latest book, Building The Beast, documents how she and her husband broke their DIY campervan conversion duck on a 6-wheel, 24.5-tonne vintage army truck they bought blind off the internet. Find all her books on Amazon here: https://author.to/JLambert

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