It was 5AM. Alarm on my phone woke me up from already shallow sleep. You can’t really sleep when you know something big has to come. And so it came - The day D was here and the Italian Dolomites were waiting for us.

Me and my girlfriend packed necessary things to keep ourselves alive, started the engine of the car and got to the roads on a path to the beautiful Italian mountains.

Where we slept

As we chose the path of saving some money, we slept in a car. We rode on the 14 years old Skoda Fabia Combi and as some random german guy pointed out:

It’s really minimalistic.

I instantly laughed at him but the guy didn’t want to offend us. On the contrary, he was rather amazed on how we were able to sleep in the car with such a limited space. And we did. We’ve built a wooden construction on which the mattress were placed. Out intention was to have some space under the construction where we could store some items. As it turns out - it wasn’t as handy as expected. We end up storing items on the mattress anyway.

We searched free parking lots using app called Park4Night and I must admit it was really useful to have this app on the phone. People over the world share these “camping” places - they rate these places, write comments and describing what accessories are available. Simply said, the information you otherwise wouldn’t find on Google.

What was the first night like

Before we put ourselves to the bed, we felt excited. We knew it isn’t going to be the best sleep of our lives, but as we’ve never tried to sleep in a car we were so curious how it’s going to be like.

First hour I wasn’t sleeping. Next hours I had a shallow sleep - like the night before our trip. It was somewhat between 3-4 AM and I felt I was finally sleeping. We slept ~5 hours. We knew the next adventure is coming, so we weren’t as tired as we usually would be.

You can see this type of photos over the whole instagram. But I’ve to admit - the view was worth it and waking up next to this austrian lake was just beautiful and we were amazed.

How we cooked

We had alcohol burner with 1 liter of alcohol in a bottle. This thing is a miracle - I can’t imagine for how long would fire last with the whole 1 liter bottle of alcohol. We cooked quite often and used only 1/4 of the bottle. What wasn’t the best thing though, the effectivity of the fire was decreased by the wind - some circular shield around the burner to increase efficiency would be pretty useful.

Our intention with the wooden contruction inside the car was, that it would be extendable to the outside - so we could cook on it. However, we weren’t so confident to put it there because mattress and other things were too close to burner so we decided not to cook on this construction, but rather on the picnic table or simply… on the ground. We were rather looking on the food cooking on the ground than cooking whole borrowed car (from girlfriend’s dad - We’re really thankful for the car Yuri)

Hygiene

Travelling in a small (but long) car brings the question on how not to smell like a full-time homeless guy from the street. When I think about it for a second, we were homeless for a while - or better said houseless. It’s not always easy to talk about topic like this but when you do things to make your dream adventure come true you can’t expect you to have an one hour hot shower like you used to have at home.

But hey, we’re not showering to have a good cozy feeling from the hot water in the first place, or to get some crazy genious mind-blowing thoughts about universe and then post it to reddit /r/Showerthoughts. We want to be clean, not having rotted smell under the arms and breath from the mouth putting anyone into coma.

We had a soap, water and a tooth brush with paste. And thats it. We kept it simple.

As the male guy, a road-trip is the best place to truly realize how often a female partner needs to go to the toilet (pee). We almost had an argument about this. We end up searching for a gas station with a toilet more frequently than I first expected. Not everyone is as adapted to the most natural approach, peeing and pooping in the nature behind the tree as I am. And if you’re mumbling now that it’s disgusting then what do you think other animals do in the nature? They give zero fuc*s what other think, they take a shit wherever and whenever they want. As I said, if you want to travel like this, you need to cut off a little bit of your comfort zone and do things you otherwise wouldn’t do (and give a little bit less fuc*s of what other think of you)

Trip stats

• We rode total 1673 kilometers (1040 miles)
• Paid 130€ for unleaded petrol gas. (65€ per person)
• Consumption, 5.5 liters per 100km. (42.76 mpg)
• Average price at gas station was 1.28 €/liter
• We spent 45 € for building wooden construction
• 18.7 € for highway tolls (9.5 unexpected)
• We’ve visited 8 lakes
• We’ve hiked 2 mountains
• We’ve visited 3 countries (Austria, Italy, Slovenia)

Top mistakes

• Not ventilating breathed air out of the car properly
• Coupling two sleeping bags together wasn’t the best idea - warmth was getting out from the bags a lot faster
• Lack of water! We had only 3x 1.5 liter bottles. As it turns out - it wasn’t much. We would upgrade to bigger cannister next time.
• Planning. Next time we would consider 1.5 - 3 times more time per place. Unexpected routes, stops, other situations require more time.
• We had to pay one-time 9.5€ toll for ~20km road part connecting Austria with Italy (Innsbruck and Bolzano), whereas highway stamp for whole Austria is only 9.2 € (Next time we would avoid this shortcut)
• One of the lake where we wanted to go was closed for almost everyone and everything. 10km far from lake they enclosed the road with a ramp and told us to take a bus which costs 23€ per person. We considered that the price was too high to pay and went away - We felt really dissaponinted and lost some fuel going to that place. Note that we’re willing to pay something, we don’t only visit “free” places - but we were really considering if the price was worth it and finally decided to not going there. (Name of the lake was Wasserfallboden)
• Not organizing things in the car properly, we moved things a lot and then searched for them a lot - it was really time consuming.

Conclusion

It wasn’t always (literally) sunshine and rainbows but we finally understood how people can live and travel this way. It turns out you don’t have to be wealthy guy to travel from place to place. By experiencing this trip, we really convinced ourselves that you really don’t have to be wealthy to travel a lot.

In the future, we would probably really appreciate a car with a bigger space in order to cook and functioning properly.

In the end, I’m so glad I gave this adventure a try. I was open to all posibilities on how to travel but was a little worried about opinions of others. As we continued further at this adventure we realized how many people are actually doing it - similar, if not the same as we do. I encourage everyone who is at least a little interested in traveling to try this no matter what others (and your relatives) think.

Below you can see some photos I’ve made. (Images are not edited with filter)

Me after my first night spent in the car

Austrian stillup lake - The lake with one of the most amazing colors I’ve ever seen

Beautiful Hallstat - without comment

Gerlos

Lago di Fedaia (2100 meters over sea) - Actually we end up sleeping here… freaking cold at night

Karersee (Dolomites in Italy)

Lake Bled (Slovenia)