Project matcha was born in Chamonix, France. This was the moment both myself and George couldn’t deny our dreams any longer; it was time to follow our hearts.

Trying to pin a timeline on where this all started, in 2018, shortly after graduating from University, we bought our first house. We poured our hearts into our house and over 6 years transformed it into our dream home.

Then in 2020 we bought our first campervan. She was a beauty!! A 1994 T4 Volkswagen. Since this was COVID times, we went to a few socially distant approved campsites around Norfolk, Dorset and Devon in summer 2020. This is when we came to love the simplicity of vanlife. Being present in every moment. Not knowing where you’re going or what you’re doing that day because you just go with the flow (something I’ve really struggled with in the past!).

Fast forward a couple of years to a complete van rennovation with a couple of trips to France and Spain, we were truly in love with vanlife.

By this point a couple of seeds had been planted in our heads but we knew living in a vehicle this small wasn’t really possible (not to mention the toilet situ!!). So at the start of 2023, we bought a Fiat Ducato, a campervan we can stand up in!! She was a welfare van in her former life! And this sparked all sorts of possibilities in our minds.

Buying this van (let alone the cost of doing it up) was a huge risk. We didn’t have enough money but we kept the dream alive and thought and thought about how we could do this. We ended up getting a loan and George documented every cost on a spreadsheet to hopefully help anyone else looking to do up a van know how much a high spec build costs. Ping me a message on Instagram or send over an email if you want this spreadsheet!

So anyway, our first trip away in the sparkling big van was the biggest adventure yet! Six weeks, three countries, and the first trip since George left his teaching career (trust me you need this much time to decompress after being a secondary Maths teacher for 6 years!). This was a gamechanger. We could go off grid for a week at a time, shower in the van, and it really felt like a mini home we could get used to. And so project matcha was born.

The whole idea of project matcha was to find a way to travel for longer. To truly live in the present and follow our hearts. So in Chamonix we decided to make our dream a reality. We started plotting how we could do this. Can we both take career breaks? Do we sell or rent our house? Is this really possible?! Since these were big questions and there was a lot to think about mentally, we took baby steps. We didn’t know what was possible without knowing what our house would go for rent wise or what it could sell for. So we hit pause on the actual doing parts of project matcha until we got home and could find the answers to these questions before going any further. More on what happened next here as that deserves its own post!

What I do want to say to end this post is that project matcha was not a super planned out thing. It was an idea and we were willing to enjoy the journey and we trusted that what would happen would happen for a reason and would work out for the best no matter what the outcome. We tried our best to focus on being present throughout this time and took it step by step. We had no idea if we could pull it off but we threw our dreams out there to the world and hey, the world delivered!