A couple who quit their jobs and sold all their belongings to travel in a campervan has completed an epic four-year adventure around the world.
Along with avoiding their work at Britain’s National Health Service just months before pandemic controls started, they amassed a huge following on social media through their YouTube channel Tread The Globe.
Chris and Marianne Fisher set off on their journey in January 2020 in a 20-year-old Fiat Ducato campervan called “Trudy” with 40,000 miles which they bought for about $21,000 two years earlier.
The pair said they realized they needed ‘to live for now,’ so they sold everything inside their 6-bedroom property in Telford, England, and rented it out to help pay for their journey.
In total, the couple in their mid-50s traveled 67,000 miles and visited 29 countries logging 28 million YouTube views and 180,000 subscribers.
“I think when you’re sitting at a desk looking out of the window and there’s a brick wall, whether it’s a weekend away or… a whole craziness like we’ve done, I would encourage anyone to just go out,” said Marianne. “If you’ve got something that’s stopping you, a fear, message me and I will put you straight.”
“It’s been phenomenal. Different places, different cultures—everybody’s given us a warm welcome around the world.”
After leaving Telford, Chris and Marianne crossed Europe before arriving in Turkey just in time for COVID-19 lockdowns. The pair settled on becoming Turkish residents for 18 months before making the decision to ship the van to South Carolina and drive across the United States.
Arriving in San Francisco, the couple headed to Vancouver at the start of a loop around Alaska. They swam in the Arctic Ocean after driving 1,000 miles along a dirt road called the Dempster Highway which leads to the most northerly road point of Canada.
The pair then crossed back into the US, and drove part of Route 66 into California then down into Mexico.
After a few months of exploring, the pair shipped the campervan from LA to Japan. They stayed for 3 months in the Land of the Rising Sun, then jumped on a car ferry to South Korea but got something like ‘traveler’s block,’ that left them unable to decide where to go next.
Refused a visa for China, Chris and Marianne toured Malaysia and Thailand before visiting India and Pakistan. Originally they planned to ship the campervan to Saudi Arabia via Karachi, but were told that the country doesn’t allow right-hand drive vehicles. Instead, the pair went to South Africa to tour a new continent.
They headed north through Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana before finally taking one last ferry home from Durban after four and a half years of traveling and living in their van.
“We had the mad idea to see if we could wild camp in Las Vegas and see a show, and we managed to stick in a hotel car park and then went to a show and Cirque du Soleil,” said Chris, picking out some brief highlights in a conversation with British media company SWNS.
“We drove past Mount Fuji. Passed the Taj Mahal in India, and the nature of seeing elephants walk in front of your van in Kruger National Park and having leopards and lions walking around was fantastic.”
In early September, more than 100 people lined the streets of Telford when they arrived back in their van. The couple said they were ‘overwhelmed’ with the support they had received and are already planning their next adventure.
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“I really feel if we do nothing else in our life, we’ve done something fantastic,” said Marianne. “We’re so happy to be home and see such a warm welcome on a rainy day—and so sad that this adventure’s over, but there’s going to be more.”
When the couple purchased their van, it had approximately 40,000 miles on the odometer. But, now after their trip around the world, the pair say Trudy has racked up more than 137,000 miles, not including 24,000 at sea.
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“We’ve always loved travel and planned when we retired one day that we would go and spend our retirement traveling,” Chris added “You get to that point in life where you realize you’re not going to live forever.”
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Through their Tread The Globe channel, the couple documented their trip online and soon built up a legion of followers and fans as they tried to live on £27 a day.
“There’s a real impact and it feels really nice that we’re giving positivity because we’re just about showing the world is a beautiful place.”
WATCH some highlights of their trip below…
SHARE Chris And Marianne’s Exceptional Voyage With Your Friends…