Wheel life with the ladies in the van

Many middle-aged American women are selling up and shipping out, taking to the roads alone in their mobile homes

Sarah Gabriel found her life's meaning in a small town in Kansas on a cold autumn morning in 2020. It was the hour before dawn in a Walmart car park and the 63-year-old rolled back the strip of floor underlay that serves as makeshift curtains on the windows of her 2008 Honda minivan to the awesome sight of a full moon looming above the spectral white of Walmart's security lights.

Here I was in Kansas, you know, like Dorothy, and the moon was doing her thing like I was doing my thing," she recalls. Hey Sarah,' she seemed to say, you're in your seventh decade and now it's time for your big adventure.'"