Truck the lot of you: meet 'global adventurers' Bobby and Marie

My knuckles have just reseated from Bobby Bolton’s handshake. He’s now 15 feet above me, shirtless, merrily sawing a hefty tree branch that’s blocking the progress of his towering camper-truck. His fiancée, Marie, surveys from a safe distance while their two dogs, Red and Rubia, snooze in the cab. They’ve seen more unusual Monday mornings than today’s.

Bobby’s story is the one we’ve all toyed with after that bad day at work, that heartrending break up, that moment of ‘sod this, I’m going to tell my boss to shove it, cash in the house, pool my savings, and go see the world’.

Normally, a good night’s sleep smooths it over. Not Bobby. After an 11-year relationship dissolved and he spied a well travelled Land Rover Defender pulling up outside the pub in which he was drowning his sorrows, he was zapped with a life changing brainwave. “I’m going to drive to Mongolia!” He mimes pulling out a phone to check Google Maps. “No, wait – not far enough. I’m gonna drive to Australia!”

Photography: Tom Barnes

Selling off his house and share in his successful London-based construction startup, he bought an ex-HS2 works truck and fashioned a one bedroom apartment on its back, using knowhow from his truck driver father and skills from the building trade.

His masterstroke was to lob daily progress clips onto social media under the name @one.life.truck.it and capture the imaginations of doomscrollers the world over. Four hundred thousand followers later, Bobby’s giving me a tour of his rolling digs as I ask what exactly he is now... Adventurer? Influencer? Extreme Trucker?

“It depends who we’re speaking to. If we don’t want to play it down, I guess ‘global adventurers’. It’s a far cry from being in a mouldy caravan, having had the rug pulled out from under me, in the winter, with a frozen toilet.”

I was really rude at that point. I just didn’t want to talk to him at all. But he kept asking questions

Bobby explains how the immediate blow up of his Instagram following provided the motivation to crack on with the build, installing a bachelor pad in the truck complete with double bed, shower, toilet, loads of innovative storage lockers, a dog bed for Red and exterior cases filled with tools and even a barbecue. But it wasn’t to remain a ‘one man and his dog’ space for very long. Within a week of setting out on his grand adventure, Marie (and Rubia) enter the story.

Somewhere halfway up a French mountain, Marie has gone for an angry run. “Someone I was supposed to meet let me down and I was so mad. So I grabbed my dog and thought ‘I want to be left alone and not talk to anybody’. As I’m going along I heard this voice saying ‘oh hey, do you speak English...’

“I was really rude at that point. I just didn’t want to talk to him at all. But he kept asking questions, and saying ‘I’m driving around the world. I’m going to Australia with my dog and my truck’. And I was just thinking, what is he talking about?” Marie shrugged off the Wigan accented weirdo and literally ran off.

It was only while checking Instagram later she found Bobby’s profile, saw the truck and dropped him a message wishing him well and apologising for being abrupt. They met up while Bobby was still local, and within a couple of weeks Marie had left her old life behind and joined the adventure. They’re now engaged, and will marry this summer – in the south of France, naturally.

Bobby and Marie didn’t make it to Australia in the end. After a monumental journey through 30 countries, braving monsoons, avoiding landslides, and visiting places the Foreign Office would rather you didn’t pop into (like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and being punched on the Russia/Kazakh border) the dream ended when Australian border regulations blocked the truck – and the dogs – because of their infamously fastidious quarantine.

Safely back in the Yorkshire Dales, Mr and Mrs Truck It aren’t disheartened. They’ve briefly gone home, then they’re going bigger. “The next truck is an eight-wheeler,” explains Bobby with a grin. “It’s an ex-military prototype, the one they used for all the testing. It’s gonna be all singing, all dancing, with slide-out decking. It’ll have underfloor heating, a dog cave...” The list of amenities is longer than any hotel I’ve ever stayed in.

Feeling inspired to leave it all behind and become a nomad? One last tip – you needn’t be an experienced trucker. “I literally did an intensive course,” explains Bobby. “Two days’ training then on the morning of my test the truck I had been learning in broke down so I took my exam in one three foot longer. But most places we go don’t ask to see my licence.”