THE STORY BEHIND PITCH & GIGGLES

We’re Not Van-Life Influencers. Thankfully.

Pitch & Giggles wasn’t born from a grand plan to sell everything we own, quit our jobs and spend our lives chasing sunsets across Europe.
We have jobs. We have responsibilities. We have two dogs who seem to require an unreasonable amount of luggage. And most Monday mornings, we still have to get up and go to work.

What we do have is Vinny, our VW campervan, and a growing appreciation for just how much adventure you can squeeze into a couple of days.

Sometimes it’s a carefully planned weekend away. Sometimes it’s a campsite booked because one of us happens to be working somewhere on a Friday. Sometimes it’s little more than looking at the weather forecast, throwing far too much stuff into the van and deciding we’ll work out where we’re going on the way.

Those are usually the best ones.

WHAT YOU WON’T FIND HERE

Perfect Van Life

We’re not particularly interested in pretending every weekend is idyllic.

Sometimes it rains.

Sometimes the campsite isn’t quite what the photographs suggested.

Sometimes the dogs are covered in something unspeakable.

Sometimes we forget something important, take a wrong turn, choose the wrong pub, burn dinner or spend half an hour wondering why something in the van has stopped working.

That’s part of it.

Pitch & Giggles is about real weekends away — the good bits, the ridiculous bits and the bits that become much funnier approximately 48 hours later.

We pay our own way, visit the places we write about and tell you what we genuinely thought.

If somewhere is brilliant, we’ll say so.

If something isn’t, we’ll say that too.

HOW THIS ALL STARTED

Somewhere Along the Way, We Started Collecting Stories

We didn’t buy a campervan because we wanted a travel blog.

We bought one because we wanted to get away more.

A change of scenery. A couple of drinks outside the van. Long walks with Hendricks and Boë. Finding a pub we didn’t know existed. Cooking something questionable on a camping stove and declaring it delicious because we’d eaten it outdoors.

But the more weekends we had, the more stories came home with us.

The campsite we’d definitely return to. The pub we’d stumbled across by accident. The piece of camping kit that turned out to be brilliant. The thing we’d bought that absolutely wasn’t. The supposedly simple walk that somehow became an expedition.

And then there was another problem.

We couldn’t remember half of it.

A week after getting home, one of us would say, “What was the name of that pub we went to?”

No idea.

“Where was that campsite with the really nice cider?”

Erm…

“Didn’t we go somewhere after that?”

Apparently.

Between us, our menopausal brains appear to be quietly deleting the evidence almost as quickly as we create it.

So Pitch & Giggles is for us, too.

We spend a lot of our lives doing things for other people, and this is one little corner of the world that’s ours. Our scrapbook. A place to keep the weekends, the photographs, the places, the people we meet and all those ridiculous little moments that would otherwise slowly disappear.

Something we can come back to years from now and remember just how much fun we had.

And, looking further ahead, something to jog what’s left of our memories when dementia eventually boots the doors down after menopause has finished bashing them in.

Cheery thought.

But at least we’ll have photographic evidence.

So yes, we hope you’ll enjoy reading Pitch & Giggles. We hope you’ll discover somewhere new, find something useful or occasionally learn from one of our mistakes.

But even if nobody else ever read a word of it, we’d probably still be here writing it.

Because these are our memories too.

Why we keep going…

Because You Don’t Have to Go Far to Get Away

We aren’t trying to tick countries off a map or prove how far Vinny can travel.

Some of our favourite weekends have happened surprisingly close to home.

For us, getting away isn’t really about mileage. It’s about shutting the door on the working week, putting the kettle on — or opening something colder — and suddenly feeling like we’re somewhere else.

It’s waking up somewhere different.

It’s discovering places we would otherwise have driven straight past.

It’s watching the dogs explore somewhere new.

It’s sitting outside the van at the end of the day wondering how something that started with “Shall we go away this weekend?” managed to produce quite so much chaos.

And then doing it all again the following Friday.

And that’s really the point…

For Future Us

One day Vinny will just be an old photograph.

The dogs won’t always be curled up beside the campfire.

And we probably won’t remember which campsite had the peacocks, where we drank the best cider or why on earth a three-mile walk somehow ended up involving most of Taunton.

But we’ll have this.

The photographs. The stories. The disasters. The places. The ordinary weekends that turned out not to be very ordinary at all.

So Pitch & Giggles is our scrapbook of life with a campervan — written while we can still remember enough of it to get the facts vaguely right.

And if it gives you a laugh, inspires your next weekend away or saves you from making one of our mistakes along the way, even better.

Good pitches. Bad decisions. Great stories.

See you at the next pitch. ♥