Aged 60, Siobhan Daniels traded all mod cons for life on the road and a walk at every stop. Five years later, she’s still out there. Here’s her incredible story.
Words: Nick Hallissey. Photos courtesy of Siobhan Daniels.
If you’ve ever been tempted to jack in the rat-race and head off on your own adventure – with no thought of coming back – Siobhan Daniels has two words for you.
Do it.
Five years ago, at the age of 60, Siobhan did exactly that. She quit her job as a BBC journalist, sold her house, bought a campervan (never having owned or even driven one before) and set off into the wild. She hasn’t looked back since.
“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she says.
“Materially I have far less than I ever had before, but every part of me is happier, healthier and just not broken by life like I was before. And a big part of that is knowing that wherever I am, wherever I’m parked, I can open the door and go for a walk.”
Siobhan’s van – Dora the Explora – has taken her to every far-flung corner of the nation, from the tip of Cornwall to the wild coastlines of Lewis and Harris, turning her into an experienced ‘vanlifer’ and enriching her passion for nature and wildlife.
But before her big decision, Siobhan had found life unbearably tough.
“For most of my life I secretly felt like a broken person,” she explains.
“I had quite a dark childhood of being beaten and locked in cellars, and from that I developed a sense of never being good enough. I allowed people to treat me badly and thought I deserved it. I got very good at pretending to be okay.”
Things reached crisis point when Siobhan lost both a brother and a sister to lung cancer, coincidentally at the same age of 53. At the same time, she felt her career opportunities were being curtailed by what she describes as workplace ageism.
“I started to rebel against it all by doing big physical challenges like marathons and the Yorkshire Three Peaks and charity treks. I felt great doing them, but they were really just ways of masking how I was really feeling.
“Then one day in my late fifties, something happened at work and I ended up locking myself in the toilet and sobbing. That was the point where I really acknowledged I was broken and something – probably everything – had to change.”
The idea of trading it all in for a motorhome and life on the road popped into her head fairly quickly, and within a few months she was ready to go.
“People around me never thought I’d go through with it, and definitely not that I would stick it out,” she says.
“I was Champagne Siobhan, famous for dinner parties and trying to live the high life. But as soon as you try something like this, you realise how much we fill our lives with clutter and things that aren’t as vital and important as we think they are. Trust me, you can live without most of it.”
An avid walker, Siobhan knew that what she really wanted to do was connect with nature. So even as she struggled to get her head around the workings of her motorhome and the complexities of electrical hook-ups and overnight parking laws, she was heading for the wildest places she could find. And it was on the shore of a Scottish loch where everything fell into place.
“I ended up on a campsite by Loch Morlich, up near Aviemore, and I said to the owner, I’m absolutely broken and I need somewhere that I can be completely on my own. She very kindly opened up a space for Dora just by the shore of the loch. And that’s where it happened.
“I walked round to the far side of the loch, stopped, and just started screaming like a banshee. Everything came out of me. Conversations with my late father about what had happened in my childhood; grief for my brother and sister; calling out everyone who had ever bullied or humiliated me throughout my life.
“Then I dropped to my knees and just felt overwhelmed by this sense of calmness and closure. And that’s when I thought, right, my mission now is to make sure no woman ever has to feel like that.”
Since that moment, Siobhan has used her blog, her website, her social feeds and most recently a book – Retirement Rebel – to fulfil that mission. She documents her travels but also advocates for empowerment, and for not feeling shackled to a system which she believes makes women over 50 feel worthless or undervalued.
And it all happens against a backdrop of fantastic walks, from Sussex, Norfolk and Dorset to the far northern reaches of Orkney. (Rackwick Bay, near Hoy, is one of her favourite places to park up and explore.) She has also documented her experiences with different walking groups, including learning the ropes of Nordic walking.
“Walking has always been important to me, but I’m not sure I realised how much,” she says.
“If you’d said to me 10 years ago I’d feel the way I do today about nature and the outdoors, I’d have thought it was all a bit woo-woo. But now I understand that connection completely. I can walk for miles and not even have a sense of the distance. I smell the trees, hear the birds. If I’m stressed, all I have to do is go outside and walk and breathe. It’s so special. I feel tearful just talking about it.
“And that’s the heart of the message really. You don’t have to feel that this is all there is.
“There is an alternative.”
Siobhan’s website (where you can also find her blog and podcast) is shuvonshuvoff.co.uk You can also find her via @shuvonshuvoff on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok. Her book Retirement Rebel is published by Vertebrate and is available from all good booksellers, priced £10.
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