The Wayward Home Podcast
The Wayward Home Podcast
54: My Campervan Adventure Exploring Italy's Dolomites
Join me in this special episode recorded in Italy as I explore the stunning Dolomites, also known as the Italian Alps. Get an insider's look into my rental Road Surfer camper van, affectionately named the Cozy Cottage, as well as a rundown of the various camping options in Europe - from free, full service rest stops (called sostas in Italy) to luxury private campgrounds complete with wellness spa features.
The Dolomites are not just a scenic backdrop but a culturally rich experience waiting to be explored. Hear what it's like to drive the Alto Strada highway while hiking, dining, exploring quant villages, and becoming part of the friendly camper community along the way. So sit back, relax and get ready to be transported to the stunning world of vanlife in the Italian Alps.
Remember to check out my Instagram @thewaywardhome for some visual aids to this amazing adventure.
Connect with Kristin Hanes and The Wayward Home!
So I've been traveling in Italy in a campervan for the past 10 days, exploring the Dolomites, or the Italian Alps as they're also known, parking in both luxury campgrounds and Sostas, which are rest stops, and really enjoying my road surfer campervan rental. In this episode of the Wayward Home Podcast, I'll tell you all about my campervan and our tour in the mountains of northern Italy, Andiamo. Welcome to the Wayward Home Podcast. All about van life, boat life and nomadic living. We'll bring you tips, interviews and stories from the road and on the water. Now here's your host, kristen Haynes. Hey there, I'm Kristen Haynes with thewaywardhomecom and I spend half the year in my campervan and half on my sailboat in Mexico. I hope to inspire you to live nomadically too. So for the past 10 days I've been touring around northern Italy in my wonderful road surfer campervan. Alright, so we are headed north up to the Dolomites in northern Italy these are also known as the Italian Alps, these beautiful, jagged peaks, and we are heading up here for many nights of camping and hiking and exploring the culture. I can't wait. But before we get up there, I want to show you a little bit around my campervan, which is from Road Surfer. I'm super lucky that they did give me 11 nights for free in this van so I could review it and share it all with you.
Speaker 1:So the campervan model I got is called the Cozy Cottage, and boy it has been super cozy. They call these semi-integrated RVs over here in Europe, which means it has a lot of components that are RV-like, even though it's in a tiny rig. So I have a full wet bath with a toilet and a shower. I have running water, hot water, heat, air conditioning and a stove and a sink and a fridge. It's been an amazing experience. So I'm going to show you around just a little bit. So you enter the RV in this side door and immediately on my left I have this full kitchen, which is lovely. There's a view out the window which I can open and close with a screen and a shade. There's running water Check this out and there's a simple two burner stove right here which I can open right up, put my pots and pans on. I have running water and a sink, lots of drawers for storage space, a fridge. The only bummer about this fridge is it is a three-way refrigerator, which means it runs on electricity a battery, but only when the van is driving and it's supposed to switch over to propane when the van is stopped. Unfortunately, the propane did not work at all during our entire trip, so the fridge contents would get warm unless we were plugged into an outlet or the van was running. So that was the only bummer of this van, but everything else worked wonderfully and I was just so excited to have this vehicle. So with the kitchen unit on my left, I turn to my right and I see two front swivel seats and then I see a little table with seatbelts for two, so two people can sit on one side of the table and then you can swivel the two front seats and you have the two other people with a table in the middle. There's tons of storage space in this RV. These overhead cabinets are everywhere in the kitchen, in the living area and in the bedroom. I just love that.
Speaker 1:Another thing that's been really interesting for me to live with is having a full wet bath. Some of you might know, in my Sprinter van I do not have a bathroom at all. We chose not to put a bathroom in because they are kind of difficult to deal with With this toilet. This is a cassette toilet, a permanent one by Thetford, and here you just open it up and you go in there and it goes in this cassette that you have to take out and then dump. And so we decided to only go number one in this cassette, because the thought of just carrying raw sewage around and dumping it down a hole really grossed me out. But it has been nice to have this toilet in here, just for you know. Number one we do have a way to go in our other van too, but this just looks more like a toilet. We have a sink. We have plenty of storage space in here, which is fantastic. There's one of the storage lockers, and what's really cool is we have hot water for an indoor shower, and the way this works is you can just open up the mirror and it slides open and creates a shower compartment, so you cannot get your entire bathroom wet. I just love this part of the van and we've taken many showers in here after long, hard hikes in the Dolomites, which has just been fantastic.
Speaker 1:The van also has a little ladder leading up to this bed and the bedroom in here is super comfortable. You do have to order bedding. It costs extras. We have a bedding bundle for two people. There's tons of storage. It's huge. It's like a queen size bed and there's windows and a roof hatch and plenty of ventilation. We have slept so well in this van. I just love it.
Speaker 1:Another component that's been super vital to us in this van is the heating system. It has a propane heating system which, when we were up in the Alps, was completely necessary for us to stay warm in the evenings and in the mornings. A warm, dry heat, you know, just easily came on in the van through many different little heater vents throughout the van, and that was something that we just both enjoyed so very much. I couldn't have done the Dolomites without the heater. So yeah, now that I've given you a tour of the camper van and you can go and see these pictures on my Instagram account as well, just go to instagramcom forward, slash the wayward home and you can see many more pictures of my journey up here in Italy, in the Dolomites and in this road surfer camper van.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's continue our trip north up to the Dolomites, which wouldn't be complete without a stop at one of these incredible rest stops that you find here in Italy. Come on, let's go get a coffee. We are at a rest stop off of the Alto Strada here in Italy, near the Dolomites, and these are really awesome rest stops because you go in and there's these espresso makers and you can order all kinds of espresso drinks. So we just got due a Americano to Americanos and a Panini which they heated up right there behind the countertop. So these are a fancy version of US rest stops, where everyone's kind of standing around outside drinking their fancy coffees, eating and using the restroom, and it's a fun experience going into these rest stops that are a glorified version of the ones you find in the US. So now we're going to drink our coffee, eat our Panini before we get on the road. We also noticed that they have full-time staff that are attending to the bathrooms here, keeping them cleaner and organized, so that's really nice. So going to an Italian rest stop is actually a wonderful experience. Bon appetit.
Speaker 1:To get to the Dolomites you have to go up the Alto Strada, which is a toll road which is fairly expensive. We aren't used to these in the United States. It probably cost 10 or 15 bucks from Milan to get up to the Dolomites on this Alto Strada toll highway, also known in German as the Autobahn. So we took that up after our one night at Lake Garda Campground and we drove up these crazy, windy, skinny roads with this RV to the Alpi di Suisi parking lot. Now this is down in a little town called Seizer Alm. It's at the bottom of the Gondola chairlift and we camped there for free for two nights, which was just incredible, and we met a lovely German couple and they showed us around Alpi di Suisi. We had phenomenal food it's called South Tyrolian food at one of the mountain huts. It was fantastic, one of the highlights of our entire trip. So our first two nights we spent up there at the chairlift for free and enjoyed eating at the restaurant. There was the possibility of grabbing water for our rig and it was just an all-around wonderful experience.
Speaker 1:After that we kept on driving through the Dolomites, and it was a little bit rainy at first, and so we were driving down these crazy highways and passes. The Dolomites are a series of these craggy peaks between like 8 and 11,000 feet high or somewhere around there, and in between these mountains are these these valleys, and what connects the valleys are mountain pass roads. These are not particularly easy to drive. They're narrow and you have to deal with buses coming head on at you, big cars, rvs and everyone's just crawling up and down these incredibly windy mountain passes. They'll sometimes tell you how many turns are left on the mountain pass roads and sometimes you'll see like, oh, there's 10 hairpin turns left till I get to the bottom.
Speaker 1:But we also really enjoyed these mountain passes because these were the places where we could go on phenomenal hikes, because at the top of the pass you're already up pretty high, you know. Otherwise you're parking at the bottom and taking a cable car up which can cost anywhere between, you know, 25 or 30 dollars per person round trip. So think about it, that can really add up if you keep taking the cable car everywhere. So sometimes we would try to park at the top of the mountain passes and just embark on hikes from there. So one of the passes we parked out was wonderful. We did an eight-mile hike and we went to see something called the Cinque Torre. It was five towers and it's where many soldiers hit out during World War I and fought the enemy from up there. So it's kind of an open-air World War I museum that we really enjoyed, and so that was one of the mountain pass hikes that we did.
Speaker 1:We also enjoyed staying at a couple of campgrounds. So up here they don't have the federal and state-run campgrounds that we're used to in the United States. They're pretty much all private and sometimes they're phenomenally nice. And some of these campgrounds do have an area, sosta, which is kind of a rest stop adjacent to the campground, which is way cheaper than purchasing a normal campsite. For example, at the first one we only paid $22 per night and then we paid an additional fee to access a swimming pool and a variety of steam rooms and saunas. That was an additional price. They also had a restaurant on site and they had a little store on site. It was just a lovely experience with these stunning views of the Alps all around us, and from there we did take a cable car up to the top of this one mountain peak and hiked around up there. Beautiful, bright green grass on the hills and these stunning gray, jagged rock formations of the mountains in the background. It's really like nothing I have ever seen before.
Speaker 1:One thing I really like about campervanning over here in Europe is that campers are part of their culture. They love campervans and campers and they are just everywhere. I love that they're accepted. You don't feel like you're on the fringes of society like you often do in the US, and something I really like is that many of these small towns throughout the Alps have a parking lot dedicated to campers. You're allowed to park there. They're often free or a very small fee and then you can walk to town and enjoy the pizzerias, the restaurants. You can go grocery shopping. So we stayed in those at least a few times throughout the Alps and they were always a wonderful experience. Everyone was just so respectful. Nobody was loud, there weren't crazy barking dogs or blaring music. It was just, you know, nice. And sometimes I wonder would this work in the United States? Would people be this respectful? Maybe this is why we don't have these things in the United States.
Speaker 1:So right now I'm in something called an area sosta. This is in Italy and also in other parts of Europe, but it's called a sosta here in Italy. It's basically a rest stop for campers. The campers are parked pretty close together. It's like a gigantic rest stop full of gravel. There are power stations around so everyone can plug in. There's one bathroom with toilets and showers, but all these RVs are crammed in pretty tight within about 10 feet of each other, and these so stas are tend to be pretty close to little towns and cities. For example, here we're at the southern end of Lake Garda, just a little bit east and south of Milan, and from here you can just walk into the cutest little town and have dinner and coffee, ice cream, groceries, but it's really easy just to get downtown, which makes this an interesting parking area, because we really don't have these in the US near towns.
Speaker 1:Everyone parks here and it's been very respectful. You don't hear people playing music really loud or speaking really loud, or you don't even barely hear a dog bark. The only issue is that a lot of people smoke. So often you get smoke wafting over to your van, which is really gross. But there's a little, you know, bathroom with paid showers. Nice hot showers are pretty cheap about a euro for four minutes and the campground itself is cheap, basically big parking lots, so it's only about 20 to maybe 22 euros a night and it's nice because it's just right here in the downtown core, easy to get places, easy to walk around, and this is something I really wish we had in the States. We've been using these so stas quite a bit and it really cuts down on camping expenses and I think it's just a fantastic idea. With that being said, I really enjoyed the experience of being able to park and just walk to town. I just often wish I could do that when I'm visiting small towns or cities on my road trips in the US.
Speaker 1:Of course, what's lacking over here are the sheer amount of public lands we have in the US, the amount of boondocking, the incredible natural beauty that you could just go and park for days by yourself in the middle of nowhere. Boondocking around here is not really a thing. You're typically in some kind of campground or sosta or one of these free parking lots, but you know they look like a parking lot. It doesn't look like you're out in the middle of nature, somewhere gorgeous, like we have with the acres upon acres, upon thousands of acres in the US run by public land management. They don't really have that here.
Speaker 1:What we've noticed about the mountains here is everything seems to be extremely developed. Obviously it's a culture that's been here for thousands and thousands of years. It has built roads and bridges and buildings. You'll see castles and old buildings everywhere. So kind of every inch of land or a lot of the land not every inch, but a lot of the land is built up, and in the mountains they're built up.
Speaker 1:As I said before, you just drive from valley to valley and you find these incredible little towns, and even up in the mountains, at 8,000 feet, you have mountain huts, and at these mountain huts we ate the most phenomenal food. So to me it was a really interesting experience to do a really hard hike and just be dying at the top. And you know just, I typically would eat what? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some carrot sticks. But you go to a mountain hut and you have fine dining. It's such a weird experience, and the meals we had were affordable like 14 bucks for each of our plates, $5 for a beer, $4 for a glass of wine, and so the food prices here have actually been way better than in the US, and the food quality has been really good as well. We haven't encountered really any bad or fast food, and that could have been just because we're touring in this part of Italy that the food is great. But I don't know, maybe the rest of Europe is good too. So that's something I've really enjoyed is just the quality of the food. The beer and the wine is just very good at lower prices.
Speaker 1:So I'll tell you a little bit about the last campground we stayed at, which was just this incredible experience. Again, this was one of those high end fancy campgrounds, but we stayed outside in the Sosta area, which is more affordable. This one was a little more than some of the other ones at 37 a night, but it was still half the price of what you'd pay to go into the campground. This was called Campground Sexton and it was on the far east side of the Dolomites, about two and a half hour drive from Venice, and this campground had this incredible sauna area, which they call a wellness area here, and it wasn't cheap. It was about $30 per person. But let me tell you there were nine saunas and steam rooms there and it was the best sauna experience I've ever had in my entire life. For example, one of the saunas actually had a crackling wood fire inside, so you could sit there and watch the fire and this dry heat. Another sauna was full of hay, so you would sit in this sauna and just smell this earthy scent of hay. That was very grounding and just an amazing thing. I've never had that. Another sauna was full of wood chips this big bowl of wood chips in the middle, so you could relax and just smell freshly cut wood. There was another one that was a dry and wet sauna at the same time, so it was dry, but then there was a little bit of humidity in the room and that was. I liked that one a lot as well. There was an infrared sauna, there was a steam room, and you can pay this money. Oh, and there was two jacuzzi's. You could sit in two different hot tubs in various locations. So you pay that $30 and, oh my gosh, it felt so good.
Speaker 1:After our 12 mile hike, we did a 12 mile hike up to the Tray Simei, which is another jaw dropping rock formation in the Dolomites, and I'll post photos there on Instagram Again, that's instagramcom. Forward slash, the wayward home, and I also have a Facebook page called the Van Life Collective and I'm posting all these photos on there so you can go there and see what I'm talking about. But these rock formations, these hiking trails, these mountain huts, the culture up there I don't think I mentioned this, but all of Northern Italy used to be more like German, austrian, and so up there you'll hear three different languages with a largely German influence. You hear tons of German, you'll hear Italian sometimes and you'll hear this local language called Ladin, which is pre-Roman, which is a pre-Roman language, and so you'll see lots of these beautiful craftsmen style buildings, like you'd expect to see in Germany, full of overflowing flower pots, and it's just a wonderful experience. Everything's so clean and nice and I just I can't believe my Dolomites trip is over.
Speaker 1:I actually have to turn this RV in tomorrow and I'm a little sad about it. I really loved being up there, the sheer amount of hiking trails, the combination of free camping and staying at these luxury campgrounds, the food and the wine being phenomenal, and having this rig, this cozy cottage from Road Surfer. I highly recommend it. Even though our fridge didn't work properly the entire time, it still worked enough when we were plugged in and we were driving and we chose not to have too many perishables in here. But having this Road Surfer van is definitely something I would do again. I know this one was free for me, but I would pay for it again because it's affordable. I think this one is $100 a night and it's a good size rig. You know, I think it's seven meters, which I'm not going to do the math on the spot, but that's what it is, and it's tall enough to walk around in and it's spacious and it's heated and it's just so cozy. There were many times throughout the trip where we were like, yeah, this is a cozy cottage and we love it. So, yeah, that's it for our campervan rental here in Italy. We'll see where we go next.
Speaker 1:We're probably going to stay in Europe for a little while longer and keep on touring around, so stay tuned to the Wayward Home podcast and, again, go follow me on social media. I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram and I'm on YouTube. I'm going to film a short tour of this rig as well, so you can take a look inside, and hopefully you'll be able to come over here to Europe sometime and check out a road surfer and the campervan and RVing culture over here, because, man, it's so cool, it's so different from the US, and so I think it's a great way to see Europe. It's still cheaper than a hotel and you have everything you need, from the shower to the toilet, to the cooking, to the fridge, to a cozy place to hang out and have all your stuff. Because, you know, the last thing I want to do in Europe is bounce from hotel to hotel carrying my heavy backpack. It's nice just to have something in one place and the ability to drive around and really see the countryside.
Speaker 1:So I hope you enjoyed this tour of my road surfer campervan and my brief itinerary of a Dolomite. Of course, I will be creating an itinerary over on the Wayward Home when I'm done with this trip, so keep your eye out for that and subscribe to my email list. Come on over and hang out with me. You can find that at thewaywardhomecom. Forward slash subscribe and I'll see you over there.