About us
Camille & Thomas, Nice to meet you 😀
Here’s our story, or how life on the road changed us!
(Don’t forget to write your own)
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I’m the kind of person who can spend an hour stuck on the first sentence of a paragraph, who listens to Nina Simone, The Kooks, and Sean Paul all within the same minute, who still gets emotional over a group song or a sunrise, who follows arnaudmontagard, magnumphoto, and Lena Situations on Instagram, who wanted to do prep school, Sciences Po, and ESJ all in the same year, but who can’t even stick with Twitter for two months. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t invest much and procrastinates everything to the day after tomorrow. But not today.
Today, I’m the kind of person who starts a blog, who embarked on a camper van adventure in March 2019, and is here to share everything with you: stories, tips, and techniques. My name is Camille, I’m 29 years old, and after years of living the “work, sleep, repeat”, I said, “I’m out”.
This blog tells my story and that of Thomas, my partner of more than 8 years. With his Quechua style, evenings-full-of-too-many-debates-and-controversies around a campfire, and a love for beautiful views over nightclubs, he’s the one who reignited the travel spark within me.
After two months crossing Sweden and Norway in a completely-not-converted Kangoo, and 8 months backpacking through Southeast Asia, in 2019, we embarked on a new kind of journey: life in a converted vehicle! A trip where we carry neither suitcases nor backpacks, but a 5-meter rolling home: Léon. Léon le daron (Léon the old man) to be exact. With savings in our pockets, jobs and apartments left behind, the adventure was ready to begin…
In this post, find out how we saved money for our travels 👈🏻
See the rest on video ✌🏼
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We’re changing our lives 🤙🏼
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Attention to those of you about to embark on the vanlife adventure—it’s life-changing!
What started as a simple experience, traveling in a campervan was only supposed to last a few months. It was just the realization of a shared dream. And then, everything changed.
As slow travel enthusiasts, we suddenly found ourselves with time. After nearly a lifetime of watching it slip by, realizing we actually had time felt as disorienting as a sleeveless puffer jacket. You sometimes ask us if we’ve ever gotten bored. After all, doesn’t travel become tiresome after a while? The answer is yes. It may sound crazy, but even the most stunning landscapes can lose their magic. So, we decided to give that time meaning, to move forward with it, to create, produce, learn, develop our skills, and take bold steps.
Our upbringing taught us to pursue studies that would lead to a career we’d stick with for most of our lives, so we did. Thomas was a nurse, and I was a wealth manager. Then, we realized there were other options, riskier, yes, but rewarding if we committed to them. Once you taste so much freedom and possibility, going back to “life as before” seems impossible. Thomas never returned to the hospital, and I never returned to an office.
Léon became our office. And within the vanlife adventure, we added a new one: entrepreneurship.
In 2019, Léon le daron was born. Less than a year later, Léon took on yet another role: he is a vehicle, a home, an office, and now also our Creative Studio. On board, we create content (photos, videos, and editorials) for tourism boards, as well as relevant, modern, and engaging visuals for brands and meaningful projects. And you know what ? Life is way more exciting 🥰.
A vision, a project, how about working together ?
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2023 : A new Era?
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Does every good thing come to an end ? Not really.
After nearly four years of full-time travel across Europe, Morocco, and Turkey, something unexpected happened: we started to miss something. After years of constant nomadism, that “something” turned out to be a sense of grounding, a home that doesn’t move—or at least moves a little less. After many heated discussions, we came to a mutual agreement: full-time life on the road, for the sake of our balance and the growth of Studio Léon, needed to become part-time. Six months on the road, six months of settling down, in search of a place to call home, a place where I, too, could hang framed pictures on the wall and lay my mother’s crocheted blankets on the sofa.
Spoiler alert: it’s not so easy to settle down when you’re not particularly attached to any one place.
Between us, I think this urge for absolute grounding may have been a bit rushed. Not that the idea of settling down scares us—in fact, we’ve come to appreciate it (a lot): building deeper connections, saying fewer goodbyes, finding comfort in routine (it really does make you more productive), and enjoying the priceless convenience of a stationary home (hello, hot water and washing machines 👋🏼). But here’s the thing: defining what “home” means for us in a more permanent sense takes time. It’s still a rough draft, but I’m sure it will take shape and make perfect sense very soon.
An adventure that goes further, and hits harder🌪
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“Six months of adventure, six months of routine”, sounds good, right ? But I want these six months to shake us up even more, in every possible way.
Believe it or not, our nomadic life aboard Léon has become just life, our comfort zone. And if there’s one thing we want to tell you on this blog, it’s this : step out of your comfort zone whenever you get the chance, because that’s where the magic happens. Dare to dream, dare to do things differently.
So, we switched continents. And then, we switched vehicles.
After months of searching for the perfect gem, and months of redefining our new route and dreams (it’s harder than you might think), a new adventure was finally ready to begin… In May, we’ll be heading back to Turkey, a country that made our hearts race three years ago. Over the coming months and seasons, we’ll continue on to Iraq, Jordan, then Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and… Lebanon?
Léon will always be Léon, the very symbol of our life transformation. Léon the “daron,” the patriarch at the head of the table, the embodiment of experience, wisdom, exploration, and adventure. This time, we just want to go even further, and live it even more intensely. Keep daring, without getting too comfortable.
👉🏼 Want to know more? Follow us on Insta at @leonledaron.
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See you soon ✌🏼