I have just carried the newest member of our travelling family into the house: a white compressor cool box. Fresh back from our road trip through Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This time we took the Sharan. 3,600 kilometres. No more than three nights in any one Airbnb. We had some lovely Airbnbs. Almost always cooked for ourselves. At some point, I started heading straight for the alcohol-free beer and chicken in every supermarket. By then, Angie was already among the vegetables. No “break in the cold chain”, whenever or wherever during the day we found the “right” supermarket for our shopping. We are particular about supermarkets. We do not really buy anything unusual, but we love a good supermarket.
Angie sometimes asks herself, and me, when we are going to find the way of travelling that is truly ours. We have tried a lot over the past few years: a hired campervan through Provence and to the Atlantic coast, Thailand by plane and hire car, road trips through the USA, yoga in Puglia and Miami, two cruises, Singapore and Bali with the whole family, and now the Balkans by car and Airbnb. And every year, our little old caravan in the Venice Lagoon.
We keep asking ourselves whether the business case for a campervan of our own adds up.
Are we really searching for the one right way to travel? In a way, yes. In a way, no. We enjoy the variety. Not every destination suits every kind of journey. And in the end, every journey is a collection of searches. This time we could not park our campervan by the sea and cook with the door open, looking out over the Atlantic. On the other hand, we sat on our balcony overlooking the Bay of Kotor, rather than wedged between motorhomes in a rather unattractive public car park.
There are common threads. We discuss group tours, but for now the structure feels too restrictive and the compromises too great. In our early travelling days — a good 25 years ago — we often carried backpacks and even a tent. These days we enjoy an Airbnb with a kitchen, a bed and a view. Nothing luxurious, but we have outgrown hostels. That sounds a little conventional. It is not, though. Or only a little.
The search is our way
Even as we keep returning to the question, searching is our way of travelling.
Just as it is in the journeys themselves. We freely admit to enjoying beautiful things. And if that means places lots of other people visit, then so be it.
At the same time, we keep looking. Usually one of us asks whether we have found what is special about this place yet. Or the other asks because they can sense that the feeling has not arrived. Is it nature, space, colour, the sense of the sea, the mountains, the scale, the creative energy, the history, the atmosphere, a detail? Usually we find something. We choose our destinations with that in mind. Sometimes we do not. Perhaps it simply was not “ours”. Sometimes it just takes a little time.
What remains is the search. Questions arise. Why are so many of Dubrovnik’s roofs new? Why is the Empire State Building still the most beautiful skyscraper in New York? Why did we chase every waterfall in Bali while only just beginning to discover Europe’s much more spectacular falls? Is “overtourism” a problem? And why, actually, did we enjoy our cruises so much? Then new layers open up. Connections. Beauty that grew out of ugliness. A conflict no longer visible. The idea behind it. Ambiguities. Almost always, the search could go on, could go deeper. But at some point the journey would turn into a research project. Travelling means beginning a new search somewhere else.
Perhaps that is also why we write about these journeys: not to find definitive answers, but to avoid immediately losing the layers beneath the first impression. And sometimes it is still enough simply to enjoy all the beauty that unfolds before us along the way.
The white cool box, incidentally, is quietly humming away in our kitchen. Our own fridge is struggling. And we have grown rather used to it.
The cool box in practice
01 – Compressor or thermoelectric: Ours is a compressor cool box. The distinction was decisive for us: a compressor box reliably cools down to fridge temperature regardless of the outside temperature. Thermoelectric boxes can generally only achieve a certain temperature difference below their surroundings. In a very hot car, that soon proves insufficient. That is exactly why we chose the compressor version.
02 – Our solution: Our box holds just under 30 litres, which proved quite sufficient for two people.
03 – Power supply: The challenge on a road trip like this is keeping the cool box running when you leave the car for a few hours to see something, without draining the starter battery. Our solution is to run the box, which only has a 12 V connection, from a portable 288 Wh power station. This, in turn, is plugged into the 12 V socket in the back of our Sharan. The socket switches off with the ignition, and the 288 Wh are quite enough to run the box for several hours. This setup also needs a 12 V charging cable for the power station, so it can charge while we drive.
04 – Alternatives: One alternative would be a second car battery connected to the starter battery via a relay kit. That is something you would do in a campervan; for our purposes, it seemed rather cumbersome. Another option would be a larger power station. That could run the cool box independently for a few days, but such units soon weigh 10 kg, and that is not what we need.
05 – In the apartment: We generally carry the cool box into the apartment and plug it into the mains using an adapter. Many compressor cool boxes also have a built-in 220 V connection and need no separate adapter.
06 – Our verdict: Yes. No discussion needed.