This is a story of an old
woman who travelled in a van. She has traveled all over the world in
her tiny van. It's a nice way of having holiday. Now at this moment,
somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, Olive Gibbs is probably
chugging along the road, in the early morning in her tiny camping van.
The travel bug came to Mrs. Gibbs rather late in life. About 14 years
ago, to help her get over the death of her husband she went on an
overland bus trip to Katmandu. This fired her with the enthusiasm to
travel more, but as she couldn't afford to go on extensive organized
tours, she bought a camper and took to the road alone. Now at the age of
72, she's clocked up about 75,000 miles on trips that have taken her to
America, Australia and South Africa. Ann Catchpole met her at her home
on the Sussex coast just before she was setting out on her current
venture another wander around America, Canada and Mexico, that'll take
about a year, and she'd been very busy that afternoon packing up the
van, mainly, as she told Ann, with stocks of food. - Of all the
meals that I have during the day, my breakfast is the one that I like.
It's not that I have a large breakfast but I do like my toast and
marmalade. I've got quite a few pounds of marmalade in my van at the
moment, I should think I have about 10 pounds, and when that run out and
if I'm down in California by then I shall make some marmalade. I take
English things like Marmite which not many other countries of the world
seem to appreciate. I'm also taking crisp breads to the United States
because I don't care for their bread very much. And I take biscuits
because I don't care for their biscuits very much. But otherwise I can
buy everything I need in the United States. But I don't like wasting my
time shopping, so I carry as much as I can and visit a supermarket only
when I'm forced to. Well, I know vaguely which way I'm going to go, but I
do change my direction if there's something I hear about which I think I
would like to see, or I don't like the road I'll go a completely
different way. And at the beginning of the day I don't know quite where
I'm going to sleep at night. I wait until I feel tired or I wait until I
see somewhere that attracts me and then I stop. The first thing I do,
and I do this deliberately, I make myself a cup of tea, and I sit
outside my van because I think it, it pleases the Americans to see an
English lady having afternoon tea. But as soon as I really ... as soon
as I arrive, especially in the United States or Canada, the men all want
to talk to me about places they've been to when they were in the army
during the war over here. Other people want to know and tell me about
where their ancestors came from, and nearly always I have been to the
places, or at least know something about them, because I do travel quite
a bit in my own country as well as going abroad. In fact when I'm
trying to unpack at the end of a day's journey and get a meal in the
evening, life becomes very difficult because people gather round and
want to know all about me and it's almost dark before I can get on with
my unpacking and getting a meal ready. But I do try to get my cup of tea
in first. In Zimbabwe, at that time called Rhodesia, and I was actually
camping in Zimbabwe by the Zimbabwe ruins. And during the night someone
went by with a torch. It woke me up, and I just thought it was somebody
going to a toilet, and I took no notice. But when I woke up in the
morning I found that a lot of my papers had been taken, and the wallet
in which I kept them. And of course I didn't realize at the time what
was going on. It must have been the noise of the door closing which woke
me up. I suppose I'm very foolish but often I don't lock myself in my
van at night. Sometimes I do if I feel at all nervous or if I'm in a
camp site on my own, then I do lock myself in. Each country has
something special about it. But I think the beauty of South Africa is
something that I shall never forget. I used to stand sometimes when I
was there and say to myself, 'Just look and look as much as you can in
case you don't come thisway again
