COVID and the moment a completely different idea emerged

When COVID began, my life, like that of many other people, suddenly ground to a halt.

At that time I was working in the tourist rental of apartments and houses. Within a matter of few days it stopped being clear what was going to happen. Tourism practically disappeared, bookings started getting cancelled one after another and my thoughts stopped being about motorhomes. The only thing I was worried about was how to get through that situation and what I was going to live on in the following months.

Interest in motorhomes didn't disappear. It simply took a back seat.

When the uncertainty began to subside, I suddenly had a lot more free time. In the evenings I watched YouTube. Not just videos about motorhomes, but a bit of everything. One day the algorithm recommended a video of an Englishman who was converting a van into a camper.

I watched it all the way through.

It was a very simple project. I worked out on the street, almost always in the rain. I put up wooden battens, insulated the walls, and clad them with plywood and wood panelling. Nothing seemed especially complicated.

Probably, most people would have only seen an entertaining video.

I saw something completely different.

I had already built my own house, so many of the tasks that appeared in the video seemed familiar to me. Plumbing, electricity, insulation, interior finishes… I had already done all of that before with my own hands.

And then a very simple thought appeared:

«If I was able to build a house, why wouldn't I be able to build a motorhome?»

At the time, the difference seemed minimal to me.

In time I discovered that I was quite wrong. In a house almost all the walls are straight. In a motorhome practically not a single flat surface exists. You have to adapt to the shape of the bodywork, dodge the structural reinforcements and make use of every last available centimetre.

But I didn't know it yet then.

And that is probably why everything seemed much simpler than it really was.

As soon as I finished the video, I messaged a friend. I told him I wanted to try building my own motorhome.

Instead of encouraging me, he tried to convince me to drop the idea.

His main argument was not construction, but legalisation. He was convinced that getting such a project approved in Spain would be practically impossible. Later on, I heard that same argument many times. Almost everyone told me that it was too complicated, too expensive and that in the end I wouldn't pull it off.

Strangely, that didn't put me off.

Quite the contrary.

The idea kept growing.

I started watching more and more videos of this kind. Little by little, I stopped just focusing on how others were building. I began to imagine how I would do it. Here I would change the materials. There I would make a different piece of furniture. Instead of wood panelling, I would look for a more modern finish.

Every new video reinforced the same feeling.

If one day I were to build my own campervan, it wouldn't be exactly like those.

It would be different.

But all of that still existed only in my head.

COVID was still setting the pace of life, my business was only just starting to recover and I was still a long way off thinking about buying a van or starting a conversion.

It was just an idea.

Very small.

But it was precisely at that moment that the seed was planted of what, years later, would end up becoming LSR365 (Freedom on Wheels).

If you have arrived at this chapter directly from Google or an AI search engine, I recommend starting from the beginning to understand the whole story of how LSR365 was born.

In the next chapter I tell how that little idea began to face reality, the initial doubts and the people who tried to convince me that it was impossible.