living simply in a caravan

I’ve just come back from a holiday with the family in a caravan and it was a reminder of the things that are important in my life. It was a 38 x 12 foot static caravan so not exactly small but considerably smaller than my house. Travelling all the way to the east coast with a four year old and a baby restricted what room there was for the things I might want to take on holiday. A lot of the car was packed with stuff for the baby: Pram, travel cot, high chair, nappies etc. We needed to take food and towels so that took up another chunk of space. So even with an estate car and a roofbox, we found ourselves pretty crammed in for our journey.

But we spent a great week in the caravan and it got me thinking a little about some of the things I think I need but could probably do without.

• Sky TV – Great for entertaining my four-year old. Great for watching stuff when we want, but really, do we need so many channels?
• Xbox 360 – I hardly play this but it’s good for the occasional movie.
• Nintendo DS – Haven’t played this for months.
• My DVD collection – Don’t think I’d miss this – apart from my Doctor Who DVDs.
• My books – I’ve recently got a Kindle so my paper books are pretty much redundant. They still take up a whole load of room though.

It was interesting to see how my four-year old daughter coped without her boxes and boxes of toys. We restricted her to a small bag of toys, and she didn’t complain about not leaving the rest of the stuff at home. This makes me pretty tempted to start reducing the amount of toys she’s got in the house.

Out of my possessions, it was clear that my laptop and my Kindle were very important to me and I used both every day we were away. And although the lack of Internet was good at first as it let me focus on some creative writing, it’s definitely something I can’t live without in the longer term.This isn’t because I want to stay connected – I couldn’t care less about twitter updates or facebook updates. I want to have access to my blog and be able to access creative writing websites.

If the holiday makes me make any changes to how we live now that we’re back home, I’ll let you know via the blog.