A woman her husband, ditched her successful business and left all her possessions behind to travel around Europe in a van with her beloved cat.
Therese Eriksson earned a good living as a freelance videographer, allowing her and her then husband to rent a five-bedroom house and enjoy a good standard of living. Despite looking outwardly idealistic, the 33-year-old woman revealed that she was miserable and deeply unhappy with her life.
So in April 2023, she decided to ditch it all and travel around Europe with her four-and-a-half year old cat Tindra in a 2007 Peugeot Boxer that she bought and converted for £3,500. Speaking last night from near Malaga in southern , she said: “The relationship wasn’t working so I decided within two weeks that I’m done with this.
"I said ‘take whatever you want, I don’t know when I’m going to come back. All I’m having is the cat’. I’m much happier now - life is much simpler. I am so grateful and happy for everything. I have stopped caring what people think.
"I don’t care about materialistic things. I’m much less worried about my appearance - I don’t always wear makeup and if my hair’s a mess I just put it in a bun. From the outside my old life was perfect. I had my company, I had a big house, it looked so nice.
"But I was never happy. There was so much pressure and focus on my career. Now my life is completely different - it’s like night and day. Then I was constantly seeing and comparing myself to other people in the rat race. Now I’m so shut off from that. I don’t look at the news and live in the moment.”
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Therese is part of a growing trend of people converting vans to live in, according to firm specialist themanvan.co.uk.
Since leaving , she has driven around 50,000 miles, visiting Spain, France, Germany and Italy in the process. Her van is insulated and has a bed and batteries to charge her phone and laptop. But it has no running water or a toilet.
This is a far cry from the life she enjoyed in her £1,750-a-month house which overlooked the stunning Mälaren Lake in the Swedish city of Västerås. She also ran a successful videographer firm called Tuss Media which she had built up from scratch since finishing a degree in geoscience at the University of Uppsala in 2017.
She did this while filming content for her YouTube channel @ThereseEriksson - which she is chronicling her current travels on. Yet, deep down, she found none of this satisfying and decided that by indulging her love of solo travelling - a bug she picked up when she travelled alone aged 18 to Egypt in 2010 - would be the best remedy.
“The house cost €2,100-a-month (£1,750) just for rent. Now I spend €500-a-month (£415) for everything. I live so free. I can decide if I want a mountain view or the beach, if I want to be in a town or the countryside,” she said.
“I meet amazing people all the time. The difference is night and day. I have always been dreaming about being a TV representer for a travel show in Sweden."
Therese continued: "I love travelling and being in front of the camera, it has been my biggest dream since I was 14. My YouTube channel and filmmaking skills allow me to travel and I have my own show and am living my dream.
"I was too scared to pursue it before because I didn’t know how I would go about it. And also people told me I couldn’t do it. That killed my dreams for so long but now I am alive to what is possible and am living the best life imaginable."
Therese's journey mirrors that of Kate Kennedy who, in April last year, The 30-year-old, from Leeds, was denied annual leave, a "straw that broke the camel's back", and so she determinedly set off to travel the .
