Dirk De Marelle
The 2021 Challenge
Updated: Dec 14, 2020

Over the last couple of years, we more and more started leaving our car in the garage. Instead, we were often using our bikes or we just walked.
Certainly for our daily shopping, the car is now totally out of the picture.
Slowly, the idea has been growing to replace our family car with a campervan.
During our cycle trips, we always say "Here we want to come back to explore more of the neighbourhood" and a campervan seems to be the ideal solution to get there.
We could just drive to all these places and do short 2 or 3 day bikepacking trips from wherever we park our van.

Of course, it's not the intention to buy a campervan but to buy a light commercial vehicle which we rebuild to our ideal tourer.
We are now using the car for :
- Holidays and short trips (if not by bike)
- Visiting our mothers, take them to a restaurant or go together for grocery shopping.
- Our shopping whenever it becomes bulky or too heavy.
- Everything a bit further away.

When Santos suggested to try out their E-bikes, we immediately saw this as part of the solution. For the bulky shopping and transportation, we will also get a Burley Flatbed bike cargo trailer.
The final goal is to use our car only for trips where we in the future will use the campervan to sleepover or for the still far away and "mother" trips.

We are of course also very curious about the outcome by the end of 2021.
- How has this extra E-luxury in 2021 been affecting riding our other bikes.
- Have we been able to reduce the need for a family car and are we still dreaming of buying a van.
Let's not "wait and see", but "do and see"
