Sitting here, at a desk inside a house, comfortably warm and dry looking out at the rain, the last year feels like a fever dream.
I’ve been having vivid dreams since staying in houses again and it adds to the haze surrounding my last 12 months. When I left on my van trip on March 31, 2023, making it a year was too challenging to even consider. The whiplash of getting stuck almost immediately in a town in Pennslyvania waiting for van repairs drove all aspirations out of my mind – all I had the brain space to contemplate was each day as it arrived, and whatever fearful visions appeared in my mind as I tried to sleep.
Immediately I was faced with the choice of digging in financially or calling it quits. The choice repeated itself time and time again since last April and every time I made the same choice – dig in. Some days everything was too much to bear and I simply fell apart. But most days I found myself able to rise to the occasion. My limits were pushed and my boundaries tested and I was surprised to find that more days than not. I was okay.
Sitting here today, the past year feels separate from me. I can still remember the days that made me break down and a few moments of true awe, but it is distant. This entire journey has been so big to process I am still working on it.
It was a trial by fire and entry into an entirely new chapter of my life. Some things you embark on knowing you will never be the same as before. And how could anyone be the same, after seeing so much? I have been to 23 states and 2 countries. I have slept in campgrounds, backyards, driveways, parking lots, and deep in the woods. I’ve driven past multi-million dollar mansions and houses with dirt floors and patchwork roofs. I’ve seen towns still propped up by industry and ones that feed off the resources of everyone around them. People have shown me incredible kindness and screamed in my face.
Living in a vehicle is, without contest, the hardest thing I have ever done. You may say one must lead a privileged life for that to be true, and you would be right – it highlights the necessity of my doing something like this.
Often my husband and I have gone back and forth on why we continue to do this – especially when the check engine light comes on again. I have offered, only half joking, that we continue to choose to suffer. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, and yet that is exactly what I do with the van.
I will not live this way forever. I don’t think I’ll see a second anniversary of full-time van life – for me, this is a temporary way to live. But something being fleeting does not diminish its significance.
I have big travel plans for the rest of this year, including a cross-country road trip and to spend a summer on the West Coast (anyone else hear Jamie All Over playing?) By the end of 2024, I believe I will be done with van life, but I am not yet. This break from vehicle living is the distance I needed to remember exactly why I wanted to do this in the first place.
The weight of living like this; the constant decision-making, sleeping in new places every night, disposing of your own waste, and managing water flow, to name a few, can make me forget why I embarked on this journey in the first place – for adventure. To see the country and all the beauty packed between these oceanic shores. To see what it truly means to live like an American.
So here’s to trying again, a touch of insanity, and the beauty of this country I call home.
