Jess & Marcus from The Road Two Spoons tell us about their travelling style and how Built in WiFi has helped to keep them connected
Youtube – @The Road Two Spoons
We are Jess and Marcus, with our two girls Rory and Jeannie. Over the last few years we have mainly been travelling outside of the UK and Europe to places such as Mexico, USA and Indonesia – We are lucky enough to have had some amazing trips but we always had to leave the girls at home. Having owned several vans over the years in 2020 we made the decision to upsize and change our adventure style. Our new mission is to travel much of our own Country and the rest of the UK before planning on heading to mainland Europe and beyond.
We have a Peugeot Boxer L4 H3 named Biggie Small; we spent many months designing the layout and interior before commissioning Vanlife Conversions to do the build on our behalf. Biggie Small is designed to be sustainable off grid for long periods of time. We spent a lot of time researching every item decision that went into the build to ensure we can wild camp without the need to worry about things like chemical toilet disposal or topping up regularly on resources. One of our favourite features in Biggie Small is the composting toilet/shower room. Having never had access to a toilet in our smaller vans we really love the added freedom that comes with this. We also have a large xed bed, full oven and stove and plenty of electricity and charging to keep us going without worrying what we have turned on.
At the time of writing, due to lockdown restrictions we have not had any trips longer than a week off grid in our van. We do the usual planning for these trips like syncing our Spotify playlists for oine modes and downloading some Netix shows. We chose to include the Motorhome WiFi system in our van as we wanted to have a permanent connection, not just to work from, but to connect other items in the van to. We have a remote temperature sensor system which can send notications to our phones based on if the van is too hot or cold, this is really important to us when the dogs are left inside. It also allows us to remotely access an internal camera as an additional level of security or again, for checking in on the girls.
We really like the simplicity of an always on connection like you would expect at home. We don’t have to mess about using our phones as Hotspots (which smashes through battery) Everything just works as expected which is perfect. Having access to our own network is also great from a security and privacy perspective. There is often a tonne of shady advertising/data mining that is done when using open networks at cafes/bars etc. Also – Why would we choose to work from a crowded cafe when we have everything we want and need inside the van. Whilst in the UK we’ve been using an unlimited data SIM on the Three network, this way we don’t need to worry about usage and can let friends onto the WiFi when they can’t get signal on their phones.
As we are based in Wales most of our travels have been up and down the country whilst not in lockdowns. We have a lot of rural areas and lots of hills. We have already had several occasions in the Brecon Beacons where our phones (on the same network) were not receiving any signal and we’ve been able to stream Netflix shows on 1-2 bars in the evenings thanks to the Motorhome WiFi setup. It is definitely worth speaking to Motorhome WiFi about your requirements as there are several router options available. We recently changed to a more recent Huawei MiFi model and saw huge performance gains in both our download and upload speeds which is crucial for handling media over cloud services and working from the van.
Would you like to share any comments about the advice or service given by the team at Motorhome WiFi?
We’ve dealt with Sophie multiple times, from our rst enquiry around the products to supporting us about additional products and after sales. Sophie is extremely knowledgeable and very quick at responding which makes dealing with Motorhome WiFi extremely easy.
We’ve recently built a free tool for the existing, and future vanlife community called Electrify. Electrify helps you understand and size your electrical requirements based on the products you want to include in your van conversion or motorhome setup. You can find it free on our website.