[NOTE: I ve blogged all these how-to posts before, but am gonna re-run them on occasion, since folks may have missed them, and many of them have been updated or expanded since they were first posted.]
If the only thing you see about “vanlife” is on InstaGram or YouTube, you’d be forgiven for thinking that every dweller spends all his time on a sunny beach in a shiny new tricked-out Sprinter, with a blonde girlfriend who looks like a lingerie model and does yoga in a bikini by the campfire. It is, according to the Internet, a glamorous and sexy life of unicorns and rainbows and chocolate fountains.
Well … no, it’s not. The harsh reality is that “hashtag vanlife!” is mostly dull and boring. Yes, I travel all over the country and visit a lot of really cool places, and I get to share them with everyone here. But I also have to do all the same day-to-day drudgery that everyone else has to do–I have to do laundry, I have to wash up in the morning, I have to cook dinner, I have to make a living, but I have to do all that in a space that is smaller than the average prison cell. “Glamorous” is not really the word that leaps to mind.
Don’t get me wrong–I love my lifestyle, would not trade it for anything, and have no desire at all to stop. Although I have the means to give it all up tomorrow if I wanted to and live pretty comfortably in whatever part of the country I choose, I don’t want to. I love traveling and being in new places and seeing new things. It’s a big country, and I want to see all of it–and vandwelling is the most flexible and most interesting way to do that. I’m having an enormously good time. It’s like a never-ending vacation.
But it is certainly not a lifestyle for everyone. Over the years, I have seen countless newbies in the various vandweller forums who fall in love with the InstaGram images and get stars in their eyes and want to live in a van (or at least they THINK they want to live in a van). And then I see most of them give it all up, many before they ever even get out on the road, and virtually all of them within a year (often after their first winter). The fact that they become disillusioned means that they were “illusioned” to begin with. They have fallen for the InstaGram glitter, and it simply doesn’t exist in the real world. (It doesn’t even really exist in the InstaGram world either–most of those glamour beach shots you see online are staged studio props for people who make their living by selling product placements and ads on social media. To put it bluntly, they are commercials.)
The brutal reality is that the majority of people who live the “#vanlife” are not doing so by choice–they have been forced into it by economic necessity. They may make pretty speeches about “finding themselves” or “minimalism” or “freedom”, but they are in essence homeless people. They live in a van because they can’t afford NOT to. They don’t travel, they don’t wander, they don’t explore–they live on the street and work every day at a job that does not pay them enough to live anywhere else. There’s nothing sexy or glitzy about that. And it is a sad reflection on the country we live in.
I am immensely fortunate because I am able to travel fulltime and make a living while on the road. And I never forget for a moment how immensely fortunate I am for that.
So, what is a typical day in the “hashtag vanlife!” REALLY like for me? Well, there are actually two distinctly different types of days in my life. Three or four days out of every week, I can be a typical tourist and go to visit a museum or a historical spot or a zoo or a nature preserve or whatever else I want to go see in whatever city I happen to be in. And the other three or four days a week, I do all the routine drudge work that I need to–everything from doing laundry to making my living.
I usually wake up each day at around 8-9 am, but I don’t have (or need) any alarm clock, so really I just get up whenever I want to. In the summer I try to get up a little earlier so I have time to do my housekeeping chores before it starts getting hot inside the van: in winter I am often happy to stay snug in my sleeping bag with my laptop until the day warms up (and if that turns out to be “noon”, that’s fine with me).
The first task is to move the van. Part of being “inconspicuous” is to not be parked in the same place all the time. So every morning when I wake up, I move the van to another spot. In most cases, this means a nearby parking lot where I can leave it all day. In other cases, where there isn’t anything else nearby, it means moving to a different parking space on the other side of the lot.
Once the van is settled in for the day, I can do my morning routines. Wash up in the sink and get dressed. Empty the pee bottle, toss the trash, and into the store to poop if needed (like I said, there’s not much “glamour” here). If necessary, pick up anything I might want for breakfast (since I don’t have a fridge for storage, I obtain perishables like milk or eggs as I need them). Once back in the van, put away anything I may have used during the night–water bottle, laptop, headphones, bag of pretzels. I have never been a neat freak, but when you live in an area of less than 50 square feet, tidiness becomes an absolute essential: if things start getting piled up out of place, it rapidly becomes unliveable. So everything has a designated spot, and everything goes there.
If it’s gonna be a “sightseeing” day, then I will have already decided the day before where I want to go, and I can grab my backpack (which always has my laptop, my camera and spare battery, and a couple day’s worth of lunch in it), and head out to the bus stop. Since I generally camp out in the suburbs, it usually takes me an hour or so to get by bus to wherever it is I am going. Occasionally, there won’t be any bus that goes to the place I want to visit, and then I have to drive there. I usually arrive at my chosen spot around 11-12 am. Sometimes I’ll have lunch before I go in: sometimes I’ll get lunch inside.
If it’s a “work” day (in general I do all my sightseeing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, unless it’s raining), then I’ll do whatever housekeeping I need, then hop the bus to the mall or the library for the day. That’s where I’ll work on my manuscripts, upload photos, download YouTube vids to watch later, and spend some time on all the blogs and online forums that I follow.
Or, when I feel like it, I’ll go to a park or the beach and just hang out all day and do nothing.
At the end of the day, I’ll either get dinner somewhere nearby, or head back to the van and make dinner there. As soon as I get back to the van, I move it again to a different spot. Then I’ll find a nearby place where I can hang out, transfer whatever photos I’ve shot to my laptop, and if I have a wifi signal I’ll poke around online. By then it’s usually about 8-9 pm, and I’ll move the van yet again to a spot where I can spend the night, and then crawl into my sleeping bag(s) and get comfy. For the next few hours I will read an ebook, watch some downloaded YouTube vids or local TV, play some games, or maybe do some work on the laptop. By 11-12 I’m asleep.
About once a month is my “travel” day, when I move to a different city. In general I do not like driving for more than 5 or so hours, so if I can’t make it in one day I plan an overnight stop where I can get dinner and then spend the night and continue on in the morning. On my first day in a new city, I spend the afternoon getting a bus pass and setting up a General Delivery at the Post Office. Then I can begin sightseeing.
And that is my glitzy and glamorous “vanlife”.
Sounds mostly dull? That’s because it mostly is. Most days, my life isn’t much different from anyone else’s–I just happen to go home and sleep at night in a van instead of in an apartment. (Though of course visiting places like the Everglades or the Little Bighorn Battlefield or the NASA Space Center or the Petrified Forest more than makes up for all the dull housekeeping days.)
A short while after my book came out, I got an email from a TV production company that wanted to talk about doing a TV series. I told them I really wasn’t all that interested in having a film crew following me around and setting my schedule for me, and anyway my life as a vandweller just isn’t exciting for TV–I wake up, I go somewhere, I come back, and I sleep. No drama, no tension, no bikini babes, no unicorns, no rainbows, no chocolate fountains, no InstaGram, no YouTube. Just me, my camera, and some really cool places.
The Electronic Nomad 