A reader emailed us last month with a specific question. Not “where do I park for free,” which we get constantly, but “how do I actually know before I park there whether someone’s going to knock on my window at midnight.” That’s a better question than the one most people ask, and it’s the one …
Tinted windows don’t do what most people think they do. Neither does parking near a “no overnight parking” sign and hoping nobody reads it that week. Stealth camping gets treated like a checklist of gear, when it’s actually a set of habits, and most of the gear people buy for it barely moves the needle. …
Most van life route advice is written by people who never had to think about fuel cost per mile. That’s the honest starting point here. Slow travel sounds romantic until you’re the one watching a gas gauge drop on a route someone recommended without ever checking what it actually costs to drive. I’ve spent enough …
We pulled into a trailhead parking lot at 9:40 one night in October, engine off, headlights off before we’d even fully stopped rolling. By the time we were parked, it looked like the van had been there for hours. We left before 7 the next morning, coffee still steeping in the French press as we …
Same van, same route through Colorado, six months apart. In July it took me four hours and a stop for ice cream. In January it took nine hours, a white-knuckle pass with chains I’d never installed before, and a night parked in a gas station lot because the mountain road closed at dusk. I hadn’t …
We ran the numbers after a six-week trip through the Southwest last year, expecting fuel and campground fees to dominate the total. They didn’t. Fuel was the biggest single line item, sure, but the combined weight of six smaller categories, the ones nobody budgets for because they don’t sound like “van life costs,” came surprisingly …
Somewhere around month four on the road, I planned an entire week around a waterfall that turned out to be seasonal and completely dry when I got there. Three hours of driving, a full tank burned on a detour, and a photo of a rock face where the water was supposed to be. That mistake, …
Somebody messaged us last spring asking a simple question: “How do you decide where to go next?” She meant it practically, not philosophically. She was staring at a map with six national parks circled and no idea which order to visit them in. Our answer surprised her, and it tends to surprise most new van …
The hashtag people credit for turning van life into a movement wasn’t started by a marketer or a travel brand. A former fashion industry designer named Foster Huntington quit his job, bought a truck, and started posting photos with the tag #vanlife on Instagram around 2011, mostly for himself and a small circle of friends …
My own first real van trip ended at mile 340, not because anything broke, but because I hadn’t tested a single system under actual daily use before leaving. The water pump ran the battery down faster than I’d planned for, I hadn’t priced propane refills into my budget at all, and by day three I …