Why Did I Move Into the Van?

I wish I could go back and pinpoint the first time I learned about van life. It feels like something that would be imprinted on me….but for whatever reason, it’s not. I’m going to try and explain why I decided to move into a moving vehicle. If I look back in my memories there are small glimpses: reading and watching stories about the valley and all dirtbags that live there each climbing season, reading about Alex Honnold living in his van full time, beautiful #vanlife Instagram influencer pictures of the backdoors of a van being open to a beautiful landscape, living in Colorado where at almost every trailhead there is a van, getting mildly obsessed with Tiny Houses, and watching some YouTube videos on van builds. But none of those glimpses feel like a defining moment to me. Then things became more real: my friends Sallie and Brian bought and built out their van, my friend Chris and I often talked about him moving into a van rather than paying exorbitant Boulder rent prices, and I started mountain biking.

I’ve lived in tiny and/or transient places many times in my life.

In high school I showed horses and we had a horse trailer with a very small living quarters (2-person table, some cabinets, a closet, and a bed above the hitch) that my mother and I lived in almost every weekend in the summers while at horse shows. We didn’t have running water so we used the bathroom and showered and cleaned dishes and did laundry in public facilities. It felt normal to me – all of my other horse show friends lived in their trailers on the weekends too.

In college I was in a sorority which meant sharing two very small rooms (think the size of a small bedroom) with 3 other girls – one “day room” which held our four desks, small couch, tv, and 2 of our closets + one “night room” which held 2 sets of bunk beds and the other half of our closets. It felt normal to me – I was very much in a Greek bubble at IU and our sorority had some of the nicest living setups of all the houses on campus so if anything, I was living large.

From ages 24-26 and for a few months in 2018 I lived out of 45-liter backpack which held clothes, some toiletries, a few pictures of my friends from back home, and electronics. Everything else I had to seek out and provide for myself – beds and showers at hostels, laundry done by tiny Thai women for $3/kilo, food purchased off the street. It felt normal to me – there are thousands of people out on the road at any given time living the same ‘backpacker’ lifestyle…and some of them do it with even smaller backpacks.

For my entire 20’s during my consulting career I lived out of a rollaboard suitcase while traveling almost every week Monday – Thursday to wherever my clients were. I can pack for a work trip in about 10 minutes with about 0 stress. It felt normal to me – all of my close friends were also consultants and living the same lifestyle.

When I’ve been stateside as an adult I admittedly have had nice apartments and houses – with multiple rooms, and more than 1 closet, and full kitchens, and ample room that I filled with custom-designed furniture. But I’ve always been restless in that environment and since 2012 I have only finished a single 1-year lease.

·   2013 – moved from Chicago to Denver for 9 months

·   2014 – backpacked through Asia and Europe

·   2015 – moved to Koh Tao, Thailand, lived in 5 different bungalows, then traveled through SEA for 3 months

·   2016 – moved back to Koh Tao and lived in 2 different bungalows then moved back to Denver

·   2017 – moved to two different houses in Boulder then moved back to Chicago

·   2018 – backpacked Central America for 2 months then moved back to Denver

·   2019 – moved from Denver to Fort Collins (the only 1-year lease I’ve successfully finished since 2012)

·   2020 – moved into the van

But I’ve never struggled living in small spaces; it feels….louder, bigger, realer, harder, better. Without things and spaces to occupy both my physical environment and my mind…I’m forced to get out into the world and live my life, even (and especially) when it’s uncomfortable.

I’m not going to wax poetic about how I think modern society is rotting our brains and our happiness for too long, but I want to set the stage of how it makes me personally feel and why I need something different. We so often use things to make us happier rather than experiences – we buy new clothes, or makeup, or appliances, or gadgets, or [insert your personal vice here] to give us some happiness. There have been chunks of my life that I lived with very little money and therefore less disposable income to spend on things – and they have been the happiest of my life. The past few years while I’ve been stateside, with a fancy career, living in nice apartments, with the ability to Amazon shop my little heart out….feel empty. I can’t really tell you much that happened in the past 4 years that really gets me excited – but I sure did buy a lot of things that now sit in a storage unit.

But I can describe to you in detail the feelings that I had when I stepped off the plane in Bangkok at 2am by myself for the first time. I can tell you all the things I did surrounding my 25th birthday on Koh Tao with Simon and finishing my Advanced OW course. I can talk about the people I met in my travels and why they made an impression on me. I can give you a day-by-day itinerary of when I met Chris Moisson in Laos and the things we ate and where we had our first kiss and how I felt about myself as a human being with him in my life. I can remember the terror of crossing the Kongma-La pass in Nepal and the very real feeling that I could die. I can tell you about how I cried the first night in the van and told Alex – “I really did it, I’m starting to live a dream I’ve had for a long time”. When I’m living small, my experiences are really big. Immense. I don’t know how my brain has enough compute power to store these memories so vividly. It’s loud. It’s a lot. It’s huge.

Back to the van.

Like I said, I have been intrigued with the van life for years and started seriously considering it in the spring of 2019. I had committed to two years at my old employer and that two years was coming up in the fall of 2019. I felt like my work commitment was coming to and end and I wanted a new adventure that didn’t revolve around the normal lifestyle that I’d been leading since coming back from abroad. My then-boyfriend and I went on a 10-day road trip through southern Colorado during the summer of 2019 and I loved being outside every single day, riding my bike, cooking outside, and having my life revolve around the sun; that trip planted a seed in my head. I knew I didn’t want to move into a van during the winter so that meant I had to make some decisions for the summer of 2020. Regarding my career, I decided to leave my employer and strike out on my own as an independent consultant so that I could make more money and have more time off between contracts to travel. I’m just not cut out for a full time job. My relationship was slowly falling apart and I started making plans in my head as someone who would be single the following summer. I toyed with the idea of buying an empty van in early 2020 and spending 3 months building it out before leaving for Southeast Asia for a quick 3-month trip to visit friends, dive, and practice yoga so that when I came back to the states I’d have a van to move into for the summer. I ultimately decided that I didn’t have the time to do that because at that point I was still traveling to NYC almost every work for work.

I also decided not to build out a van because I’ve spent such a large chunk of the past 4 years since I’ve moved back from abroad very, very alone. I enjoy my alone time and get my energy from being alone – but I love social interaction with those that I’m really close with. I knew that moving into a van alone would be even more isolated than the life I was living at that time and I just didn’t want that. I wanted to wait to live in a van until I was in a relationship with someone so we could share that experience together.

So I decided to scrap the van idea until a later date and spend 2020 and 2021 living abroad again. I had plans for a Japan trip with a close friend, a Koh Tao reunion, a SCUBA dive liveaboard in Myanmar with all of my dive instructor friends, a spiritual yoga retreat in Thailand, spending a month in Bali to see if that might be a place I want to make my winter home, going to India and doing my yoga teacher training, and just generally being a citizen of the world again. I had never been so excited for anything in my life than I was for the 1-2 year trip I had sketched out for myself across the world.

Then COVID-19 hit and my life completely fell apart. I was supposed to leave the country on March 28th for 2 weeks in Japan but then the virus started getting serious and I decided I wanted to get to Koh Tao as quickly as possible before borders closed so I could wait out the global pandemic there with sun, sand, and friends. I changed my flight to leave on March 20th and scrambled to pack up my house and move it into a storage unit. Two days before my flight departed, Thailand announced entry requirements for foreigners that effectively closed their borders. My house lease and work contract were scheduled to end on March 31st. I had setup everything in my life to travel abroad for the next 12-18 months. Within days I had to change my entire life course. I had to figure out where I was going to live. I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my job. And I had to figure it out in a matter of days. It was….heavy. And hard. And loud. I felt alive again.

Within about 24 hours of the Thailand entry requirement announcement I had a rough plan: I was going to find and buy a van and live a dream I’d had for a while…I was just going to do it solo and in a completely different world than any of us had imagined. I found the van, I picked it up, and I’ve been in it every day since mid-April.

So here I am in the van. It’s 9:28 am, I’m in Del Norte, CO. I made my bed, did my dishes, and scrubbed my stove this morning. I am listening to Flume on my portable speaker. It’s a little chilly out so I’m burning time in the van before I start my mountain bike ride. I pooped in a hole this morning. I’m sketching out what rides I want to do over the next few days while I’m in the area. I swept the floor. I’ve cried twice while writing this post. I can hear birds that I don’t know the name of outside my van door. I’m alive.

It feels normal to me – because wherever I’m living life the loudest is where I’m happiest.