Off-Grid Voices - A Chat With Lindsay Johnstone
Hi lovely reader 👋
Welcome to Off-Grid Voices, a series of written interviews with others who are out there living their best lives, living lives that are a little outside the norm, a little different. I’m hoping this series will inspire some of you who may be thinking about living a life off the grid, travelling the world, doing #vanlife, or anything else that you may be considering. Hope you enjoy exploring these lifestyles with me. 😊
This month we get to know Lindsay Johnstone, who writes on her Substack What now? Our conversation focused on travelling in a van around Europe with kids without a real itinerary.
Here’s Lindsay:
Lindsay is a writer, literary critic and expressive writing facilitator from Glasgow, Scotland.
Her publication, What Now? With Lindsay Johnstone is a Substack Bestseller, and in the global top 40 in Parenting. In her own words, she “rattles roughshod over the peaks and troughs of post-therapy, perimenopausal midlife.” She writes about mental health, desire, sex, family and caring, as well as her reading and writing life. Lindsay also hosts a conversation series called The Cost of Caring where she discusses life at the intersection of caring and creativity with her contributors. Through her Substack, and IRL she teaches expressive writing and memoir.
She also writes for Glasgow Review of Books and is a judge on the 2025 Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She is the author of one memoir, which is serialised as an audiobook for her Substack Membership, and for which she won the John Byrne Award in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Award at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival in 2022. She is working on her first novel and a new narrative non-fiction book on perimenopause. She is one of Arvon’s Advanced Writing Programme cohort for 2024-26.
I first ‘met’ you at the Sparkle Summit, listening to the panel on memoirs, and it looked like you were attending from your van. Reading a bit more on your Substack it sounds like you’re doing a lot of travelling, and with your family as well! Tell me more :-) What does your current #vanlife lifestyle include? How often do you travel, how long have you been living this way?
We bought the van in early 2024 when we knew our summer would look very different to our usual one. My husband was changing job and we had the summer ‘off’ for the first time. I arranged to take parental leave from my day job at Scottish Book Trust, Scotland’s national literacy charity, and we set to planning the trip of a lifetime with our two daughters, aged 9 and 12.
None of us enjoy too much heat, so the plan was to explore northern Europe and Scandinavia, taking in the Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark and Sweden, though we had no fixed itinerary after the first campsite near Hook of Holland and were happy to be planning while we were on the road.
The van we bought was a 2008 7-berth Ford motorhome with static bunk beds and an over-cab double bed. We knew the layout would be good for us because we didn’t want to have to make and un-make beds at the start and end of each day, and wanted a social / dining area in the van that was just that. It reminded me of trips I used to take as a child up and down the west coast of Scotland on my grandparents’ boat, Eljada, actually. There are lots of similarities between boat and vanlife, as I wrote about on my Substack at the start of our trip!
We planned to be away for seven weeks, and before the big trip took the van on a couple of long weekends to get used to it. We’re seasoned campers, but this felt different. We had to get to know how the van operated as a vehicle and as a home-from-home. Again, I wrote about those trips for my Substack, and I think my conflicted feelings about the big trip were pretty clear!
and
Where have you travelled and what’s your all-time favourite travel destination?
On the van trip, I loved all of Denmark - from smaller islands like Samso to the bigger towns and cities. It was so peaceful. Calm, orderly. A really well-looked after and safe-feeling country. Beautiful, too.
I also love Scotland’s west coast. We took the van to Arisaig in May and it was glorious having such quick access to the beaches from the campsite.
If you had to explain your lifestyle in a couple of words, how would you describe it?
Well, my normal lifestyle is very far from the one we adopted in the van, I’ll say that!
I’d love to learn a bit more about the benefits you have seen in your own life from adopting this type of lifestyle?
It’s far more simple in many ways. Fewer possessions and a sense of freedom that comes from being on the road. It felt to me temporary, though. With two daughters (one who’s taller than me) it was hard to imagine us being able to live like that indefinitely. Rainy days were hard. As were travelling days if we had been on the road for a while. But in saying all of that, what was wonderful was the sense of possibility I got from not planning too far ahead. In life, I’m a planner but on the road I was happy to relinquish some of that control. Maybe that’s the thing I need to embrace more of in regular life!
We all know life isn’t just about the positives and making changes can come with challenges and frustrations as well. What would be your biggest challenge of travelling in the van and how did you overcome these challenges?
Being cramped and confined! We all had headphones which helped us to tune one another out when we needed to, and the bunks had curtains which feels like a must - a bit of privacy and a place to escape to!
And of course you did all of this with kids - what would you say is the impact on them, what benefits are they seeing / what benefits are you seeing for them?
They became better friends again as a result of being together so much. At home, they exist mostly in different spheres now that they don’t go to the same school or share that many interests, so it was lovely to watch them rediscover what they enjoyed doing together. Swimming and biking together was great - I loved watching how confident they grew in both skills as the weeks went by.
What advice would you give someone who is looking to do something similar?
Don’t over-plan! Make time for downtime (my husband took his guitar and barely lifted it because we were so busy!) and definitely make sure you have bikes with you because navigating a motorhome around city streets is no fun, and once you’ve parked up at a campsite you really don’t want to have to pack up again to drive to a supermarket! Relatedly, if you are using campsites with facilities, make sure you fill your water tank when you arrive at a new place; don’t wait til it’s run dry because you’ll then have to pack the van up again and drive round the site to find it… These are the situations arguments are made of when you’re on the road!
Something that inspired me this week:
from the Substack FLOW: Letters from the moss inspired me to take on a 100-word challenge: finding 100 words to describe something, from observation, which she did beautifully in this article.So I went outside and because I’m not that great at descriptions, I picked a broader topic and decided I would find 100 words to describe the New Zealand native bush surrounding me.
lush, green, full, vibrant, dense, beautiful, layered, foliage, wild, ancient, untouched, life, moss-covered, tangled, calm, serene, quiet, untamed, sparkling, enchanted, evergreen, silver, tall, towering, majestic, restoring, overwhelming, immense, vast, colourful, home, birdsong, peaceful, shrubs, leaves, branches, forest, earth, connected, isolation, mysterious, resilient, shelter, safe, unique, breath-taking, serene, free, tough, strong, diverse, textured, rugged, overgrown, rich, inviting, abundant, jungle, comforting, captivating, fresh, cool
Ok that’s roughly 60 - this is actually very hard, but I really enjoyed doing this. It’s a kind of mindfulness exercise which forces you to really look at your surroundings. I might try it again with a less broad topic, I think I made it harder on myself picking something so big…
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Thank you for sharing this story! I have not lived in a van but moved abroad many times in my life (from Germany to the States to Wales to Canada, back to Germany, Portugal for a short time and back to Germany). I am currently pregnant with my first child but itching to move abroad again. Most people would probably raise their eyebrows and think that this is the worst time ever to move - with a soon to be newborn or young child. Stories like this encourage me that there are many people out there who make this lifestyle work with children. Children don't have to take a way from the experience, in fact they can enrich and already so rich experience even more!
There are so many takeaways from this article.
I appreciate the intimacy of living in such a small space and the sense of possibility that comes from not planning too far ahead.
The freedom to let go of control is a lesson I’m sure many of us could benefit from.
Thank you for sharing Sophie & Lindsay!