Vanlife has been blowing up on Instagram and youtube for a while. So are we just following the trend?
Kind of.
Will has wanted a campervan since the early 2000s. When our kids were small and we were still raising them in Southern California, our travel budget was camping. We didn’t have the money to take a family of five on flights, so we started out taking them to state campgrounds. And Will wanted a VW camper. Not those old willywagon campers, but the newer ones like the Eurovan. The problem was, we were two young parents who didn’t even own a home let alone recreational vehicles. I was still starting out in nursing and looking for a place with enough bedrooms for all of our kids. And that was the second problem. We had three kids. And those Eurovans are really made for 4 people. So I told my husband, it was not gonna happen.
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Enter the Pandemic
Just before the pandemic started, we were looking at the possibility of all of the kids moving out. One was about to graduate college, another was moving abroad and one was already on their own in Northern California. And my husband started showing me #vanlife on YouTube. I started watching and envying the freedom they had to travel. I was ready to sign up for living in a van. But almost all of these YouTubers were not like us, they were millennials without kids and mortgages. It seemed like a farfetched idea, not something we could do. In fact, my husband was not too keen on us being vanlifers. He wanted a *weekend* campervan, not some permanent lifestyle. But once the pandemic hit, big shifts started taking place. Like I said before, we sold our house. We quit our jobs in Southern California. We moved to Washington. But a huge one was, we paid off our debt. How much debt? Like 100k. We paid off my car, my student loans, all of our credit card debt. And we were able to that because we sold our house.
Normally selling your house isn’t the recommended way to pay down debt. But the housing market was booming and we wanted to move anyways. The pandemic had us feeling like this was the time to leave LA. It wasn’t something we had really planned to do yet. In fact, a lot of the things we did during the pandemic were on our 5-year goal list. The van was on the 5-year goal list too. But suddenly it all seemed possible and the pandemic gave us that push of why not now? What are we waiting for?
So once we decided to go for it, I started saving big chunks of my paycheck for a van. And WIll started scouring ads. He wanted a newish passenger (for the windows) van with low miles. But because vanlife is so popular, buying a van was getting pretty competitive. I was so into it I would have probably taken any van we found. In March of 2021, we bought a 2013 Ford Econoline 150 passenger van with less than 100k miles. And I started saving money for vanlife.
We wanted at least 3 months on the road. But Will wanted to keep his job. So he started looking at the per diem work requirement. Per diem, in nursing, is a part-time non-benefit position. It usually comes with either a minimum per month or a minimum per week requirement. His position required a minimum of 4 days a month. So our planning included making it back for those 4 shifts per month.
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Marriage in 65 square feet
Our van is tiny. I mean 65 square feet tiny. My husband and I sold our 1552 square foot condo to travel around in 65 square feet. That is a lot of time together for a couple that is used to living in a bigger space with 3 kids. In fact, since we both had kids when we met, living together alone is already a new experience for us. But part of doing this is for us to try out new things and put ourselves in new situations. We are ready to try out new adventures and see new places together. But our relationship is important to us. And after doing everything for the kids for all of those years, when you get to the empty nest stage of life, you can find yourself pretty distant from each other. We were very good partners and we problem solved well together. We were good at managing the business of our lives, somewhat. But we wanted to have hobbies that we enjoyed together and to grow together, not just alongside each other. Part of this move for us is freeing ourselves up from some of the materialism we’ve grown accustomed to over the years. And another part is to spend intentional time together. Not just time on the couch each on our own devices (although, I am sure there will be times that we still do that).
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This new situation is definitely going to test out our communication skills. But we are jumping in anyways. What things about vanlife would be hard for you (and your partner?)