What I Missed
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yup, that’s a photo of my van up above, sitting in my driveway. I took this from the space in between the driver and passenger seats. So that’s the entirety of the living space you’re looking at. I've been asked many times since my road trip what I missed the most living in a van instead of a house for over a month. It's an obvious question but the funny thing is, I've really had to think about this. Because the weird truth of it is, I missed less than you'd think.
1. Unlimited water. Indoor plumbing is kind of amazing. No, not kind of. It is, full stop. This isn't true of many poorer countries, but most developed countries have an unlimited amount of water available for drinking, bathing, hand washing, dish cleaning, you name it. You really learn to appreciate this when the supply drops from unlimited to very limited. When you're on the road water is really the primary thing you have to worry about. There are other concerns, but none of them really made me nervous except for running low on water. You can find water in many places, but a lot of the time it isn't potable (aka drinkable). Many decisions for me revolved around how much water I had and where I'd fill up again. I would eat at a restaurant or cobble together something with a bunch of room temperature or cold items rather than cook. Because washing dishes requires a huge amount of water compared to most activities. When I was low on water I'd use hand sanitizer instead of washing my hands with soap. I'd use body wipes to wash my face instead of face wash I could rinse off with water. I'd drink from my reserve of bottled water instead of out of my tanks. Being able to turn a handle with almost no effort and having clean, usable, unlimited water just pour out of a facet in your house really is one of the great achievements of civilization.
2. Showers. I know this is related to the above, but it's different because I made the choice to forego any kind of shower in my van. There are many options, some more luxurious than others. I was aware of these options and I opted to go without. If I'd known how many days I'd experience temps over 100 degrees, I probably would have chosen differently. But I didn’t, so I had no ability whatsoever to shower in my van. That meant I had to seek out options or simply go without. I'd rely on body wipes made for this purpose, which are WAY better than nothing but not the same as a shower. My primary source of showers was Planet Fitness, which I joined right before my road trip after reading about this as a popular van life option. And that worked pretty well. I may cover all of the pros and cons of that choice in the future but for now I'll just say there are a lot of Planet Fitness locations but they aren't everywhere. Utah barely has any of their gyms at all. Arizona? 0. New Mexico? None I could find. Going a couple of days without a shower isn't a big deal. But 4 or 5 days, when you're spending your time hiking and mountain biking in scorching hot temperatures? You really, really want to find a shower at some point. There are a lot of possible options (truck stops, rest areas, welcome centers, organized campgrounds, spas, the list goes on) but it normally requires going out of your way and paying some money. It's still worth it if you really need a shower, but it makes you miss the convenience of showering whenver you want at home.
3. My bed. Maybe it’s just me. I don't know how other people feel on this topic. The bed in my van was...fine. Not uncomfortable but not super comfortable. Not tiny but still kind of cramped. It's a full size bed but at home I have a very nice king size bed. I can't say the bed in my van cost me a lot of sleep but I do think the quality of my sleep was less than at home because of the bed itself. I noticed it immediately upon returning home, where I would wake up feeling more rested. I was so happy to have my bed again because it really was way more comfortable than sleeping in the van. Having said all of that, there are things I could have done to make the bed more comfortable and for my next big trip I'll probably try out a couple of different things.
4. Guaranteed(ish) Internet. On my trip I decided to simply use my phone and rely on the network, using a hotspot to connect my laptop to the internet. Overall, I was really impressed with how reliable the Verizon network was on my road trip across the middle of the country and the southwest. But there were still plenty of spots with poor or no service. As someone who works remotely and needs the internet to do their job, it became another factor I needed to account for wherever I was going. Even decent coverage areas often had poor performance for more bandwidth hungry tasks including video calls. It was generally manageable but sometimes I'd setup shop somewhere only to realize it just wasn't going to cut it and I've have to drive until I found stronger signal. There are things you can do to minimize these issues, the most popular being a cell signal booster or satellite internet such as Starlink. Neither is particularly cheap and they have drawbacks as well. Still, in the future I'll probably try one or both of those to increase the odds that I have good coverage in the areas I want to go to.
5. Space. Yes, living in a van is a small space. Mine is a standard wheelbase, not the extended wheelbase which offer a bit more living space and more flexible arrangements. But even so, it's still a small box versus an apartment/condo/house most people live in. I'm lucky enough to have a decent sized house with things like an office with a pool table, a home gym and a very open and spacious kitchen. My van had none of those things. The surprising thing for me was that this wasn't a significant or primary concern for me during my trip. I'm going to cover things I didn't miss in another post, but suffice it to say this wasn't top of mind for me the whole time I was on my trip. However, it did crop up. Every time I banged my head off a cabinet or the storage area above the drivers seat, I would curse and blame the lack of space. When I had the drawer for my fridge open and I was using the 2 small counter spaces to prepare food, there was basically nowhere to go and nowhere to put anything else. I'd get annoyed. Every layout choice in a van presents benefits but also comes with drawbacks. There isn't a perfect way to arrange things because space is always at a premium and it's always going to be a compromise. Overall I think you get used to it but there are still times when frustration mounts and you get frustrated by the lack of space. If you’re lucky, when those times come around you’ve got a great camping spot with beautiful views and the ability to go for a walk.
That’s about it really. Sure, other things bothered me from time to time but they were unique concerns from living in a van not something I was used to having at home. Now it's important to state the obvious here: I lived in a van for 5 weeks. After 5 months or multiple years, I suspect this list looks different. I plan to take some longer trips in the future and I’ll be interested to see if this list changes. Maybe I get over the things listed above after a time. Maybe other small inconveniences mount and become a bigger deal. Either way, you can tell most of these things aren’t MAJOR items. And most of them can be mitigated in various ways. The biggest takeaway for me was that I can get by with a lot less than I thought. Where I was, who I was with and what I was doing all mattered a lot more than what I had on me. It’s easy to fall into the trap of keeping up with the Joneses. So the next time your neighbor comes home with a shiny new car and you feel a little pull to keep up with them…just hop in your van, drive up the side of a mountain, find a camping spot with a view and open the back doors facing west. As the setting sun catches the sky on fire you can sit with yourself in the quiet of the forest with nothing to intrude on your peace but the buzzing of crickets, the chirping of birds and the gentle sound of the breeze through the leaves. I promise that thing you felt envious of won’t seem very important anymore.
Fun Lessons From The Road
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
We like to say the world is small, but when you travel it you realize it is vast. It’s full of wonderous and terrible things. Things that will astonish you. And things that will make you scratch your head and say, “But why?”. Even in your home country. I wanted to share a few interesting things I encountered driving over 6,000 miles across America.
There is a lot of space out west. I’m starting with kind of an obvious one, but even though I knew this intellectually it was different to experience it. I enjoyed camping so much more in the wide open spaces out west than the cramped and crowded east coast that I’ve always called home. Here’s a quick visual to prove my point; look at all that white and light pink space. That’s where I like camping.
Image courtesy of https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/
2. Cows cannot be trusted. This sign made me chuckle, it was along a hiking/mountain biking trail in Moab, UT.
3. Beware light timers. Many public parks will allow you to park there overnight, which is really nice. I used a few during my travels and most of them also have public restrooms. That’s all good stuff. However, some of these (looking at you Kansas) have lights that turn on automatically when motion is detected and then turn off to save power when no motion is detected. Do you know where there are no motion detectors? Yeah, that’s right. Inside the stall. I know what you’re thinking. “Geez, how long were you in there?”. The answer is 5 minutes. I timed it after the incident I’m about to describe. Trust me, a public park restroom is the last place I want to hang out and spend any more time than is absolutely necessary. But I think we can all agree that 5 minutes is a pretty tight window, especially when you don’t realize there’s a time limit. Imagine doing your business when all of a sudden the bathroom goes pitch black. You’re in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. You’ve never been there before. It’s 11pm. A lot runs through your head.
When I first entered the bathroom I was really impressed with how large the single stall was. I had a less positive perception as I waddled my way over to the door to open it and wave my arms around to get some lights on so I could finish up and get the hell out of there. You’re welcome for the visual.
Artist rendering of what the bathroom looked like with all the lights off.
4. USA must hold the crown for best road trip country in the world. We just must. We have this giant contiguous mass of land you can drive on for days and days on end. Deserts. Rainforests. Mountains. Plains. Oceans. Lakes. And on top of that, you can get everything you need if you look for it. I couldn’t believe how many things existed right in front of my eyes that I’d just never noticed (or had any reason to notice) previously. I was blown away by the number of places that offered showers, bathrooms, free wi-fi, water filling stations and more. They’re at rest areas, gas stations, country stores, welcome centers, public libraries and more. Yes, public libraries still exist. It’s possible I just happened to go along well established routes and there were definitely stretches where I had a hard time locating some of the above. But overall I couldn’t believe how prevalent these things were in places I’d been going all my life and just never noticed.
This is the largest gas station in the world, a Buc-ee's outside of San Antonio, TX. I didn't stop at this one, but it illustrates what's out there. It has 128 gas pumps, 80 restroom stalls, 60 cashiers working at a time. Crazy.
5. People aren’t so bad after all. I can be guilty of taking a cynical view of things from time to time. But I interacted with dozens, possibly hundreds, of people over the course of 5 weeks all over the country. Did drivers annoy me? Of course. Did I see selfish or inconsiderate behavior? Yeah, it was still people. But my interactions were so overwhelmingly positive that I’m struggling to come up with any specific examples of negatives. Almost everyone I met was friendly, open and kind. People gave me directions, gave me great tips for local activities and restaurants, helped me change a flat mountain bike tire on the trail, convinced me to do the hardest part of the hike to get the payoff, invited me to meals and drinks and in a couple of cases even opened up their homes to me. And not one person asked me what religion I was before showing kindness. I was never asked if I was a democrat or republican. There’s so much rhetoric and vitriol and talk about division. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I’m just saying that’s not what I saw at ground level. I recognize I may be in the easiest possible position as a straight, fit, white, male. But others I met on the road echoed the same sentiment. People are generally good and for the most part we all want similar things. As someone prone to fits of road rage, I didn’t expect driving across the country to restore my faith in humanity. But honestly, it kind of did.
Do the thing before you’re ready to do the thing
Moving forward requires you to start moving in the first place
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or the waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
-Dr. Seuss
I consider myself a very special blend of procrastinator, overthinker and perfectionist. Which makes starting things very difficult. I make excuses, come up with logical objections and resort to checklists of things that need to be done BEFORE I can start. Checklists are a big thing for me. Too big of a thing. Don't worry, I'm working on it. Right after I knock out a couple of prerequisites first…
I’ve had thoughts of building a site to house a gallery and trying to sell some prints of my photos for a while now. But I always had a lot of reasons why I wasn’t ready. I needed some more high quality images first to have a fully fleshed out portfolio. I needed to find the right printer to deliver high quality product. I needed to research what others were charging and understand what I should charge. None of these things were untrue, but they were convenient. Those are fairly sizable items to tackle and so it was OK that I wasn’t getting started on a website. I had a a completely justifiable, logical argument for waiting. That’s my trap. That’s what prevents me from moving forward with things I want to move forward. Or at least things I say I want to move forward. I have this tidy little explanation that nobody could fault me for because it’s understandable why I would want to knock out X, Y and Z before I get started.
I was at risk of pulling this same trick for my road trip. I had a laundry list of things I felt I should do before I committed myself to a month or more on the road. A June trip turned into a July trip which turned into an August trip, because “I should really have whatever taken care of before I take off”. As I often do, I caught myself doing this. I realized what it was and how easily I could explain away why the road trip hadn’t happened yet. And I could picture myself a year from now, sitting at a table with someone having a beer explaining how close I’d come to really doing it. But this time, I said screw that. I wasn’t going to make excuses for something that had really excited me, that would challenge me and, I hoped, do me some good. That night I built out a rough sketch of what the trip might look like, with ideas for where I’d go and how long it would take. A week after that I went and looked at my first van. A week after that I bought one and drove it a couple hundred miles back home. Two weeks after that, I left for my trip.
Did deciding to plow forward despite some concerns allow me to check off all of those items I wanted to complete before I left? No, it did not. It turns out I was right about one thing: there wasn’t enough time to do the trip in August. But I’m typing this from the middle of Utah, nearly 3 weeks into a trip I wasn’t ready for. Because what I realized was, even if the list was legit, maybe it wasn’t all absolutely necessary to take the next step and do the thing. Only one of the fog lights on my van works. The wire relay needed to be replaced and my local dealer couldn’t get it before my departure date. So I don’t have fog lights. Would they have been nice a couple of times? Sure. Necessary? I’ve made it this far without them. I had really wanted to take my van camping close to home so I could familiarize myself with things like the electrical system, emptying the gray water, filling the potable water, get used to using the propane stovetop. But I simply didn’t have time before the date I wanted to leave. So you know what? I got familiar with it on the road. There were a hundred small things that I had on my list that I didn’t do. My windshield wiper fluid sprayer doesn’t work on my van. I have no idea why, it just doesn’t. I didn’t understand rules for dispersed camping on BLM. I hadn’t even attempted to use some of the apps on my phone I considered critical to making my way across the country and finding places for drinking water, propane fillups, camping spots, etc. I have zero spare fuses onboard as backups in the event something pops one of the existing ones. I did basically zero research about the many national parks I wanted to visit, so I wouldn’t know what was worth seeing, how to see it and whether I needed reservations to get in. And yet…here I am.
Something this trip has reminded me of is that I’m a fast learner. So I picked up on a lot of “van life” essentials after just a few days. At this point in the trip I never know where I’m going to be spending the night until about 30 minutes before I’m parked there. The other thing I realized is that when you’re put in a situation you’re not prepared for, you just figure it out. Because you have to, it’s as simple as that. So, yeah, I’ll be pissed at myself for a minute if a fuse blows and my refrigerator stops working. But I’ll just find a fuse somewhere. Because I won’t have a choice. And if I can’t, then some food will go bad. I won’t die, there are restaurants and grocery stores on every street corner in America. I think I often inflate the consequences of things, I couldn’t tell you why. But most of the time, the stakes are really not that high and I’m holding myself back for no reason.
So it is with this website. It’s not perfect. I wanted it to look better. Have more stuff. Allow purchases. But it exists. That’s the hard part. I began and now I’ll learn as I go and I’ll get it the rest of the way there. Maybe you have something you’ve been waiting to do. Something you’ve been putting off. If you do, I would encourage you to just take the first step. Even if you don’t feel ready. Especially if you don’t feel ready, because you can mostly make it up as you go and you’ll be forced to learn and grow in the process. I don’t know what your thing is, but I’d be willing to bet the cost of failure is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. So stop waiting, all of those objections are still going to be there when you come back to it. The only difference will be the time you lost that could have been spent working your way through them.
Van Life Begins
Simple lessons learned on day 1 build confidence and hope
"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Having never been remotely interested in this thing called van life before, I knew very little about what I’d be getting into. But I had a pretty strong desire to get started, concerned that my enthusiasm would wane and it would remain yet another idea I was excited about but never actually went through with. So I came up with a timeline, and it was tight. Which left me with a finite amount of time for learning things and preparing. I decided to prioritize actually buying a van (I’ll get into why I bought instead of rented in another post) over basically everything else, because it was the keystone for the whole venture.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I learned just enough about vans to have an idea what I wanted and I made the purchase with about 2 weeks to go before leaving. Skipping ahead those two weeks, I had a van packed to the gills with clothes, food, camera gear and odds and ends I assumed I would use out on the road. For my first night I had done a little research to make sure I knew where I was going to stay. So with a spot in mind, I pulled out of my driveway and headed to Nashville.
Not the part of Nashville you’re thinking of. I’d selected a parking lot that allowed overnight parking just outside of town. After a couple of stops along the way, I arrived at the location. There were only a few cars there, it was getting dark, and I pulled into a spot I thought would be out of everyone’s way in case they came through with a boat. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it was a parking lot with river access, mostly for launching boats. Multiple lessons were learned that first night.
Lesson #1: Level ground should be prioritized when parking your van. I parked at an angle on a damn boat launch. Common sense would normally tell me this is not a great idea. But I was more concerned with the larger adventure I was on and didn’t even think about this. So when I opened cabinets, stuff fell out. When I put things on the counter, they rolled away. And most importantly, when I was in bed trying to sleep, my body wanted to slide down into the corner of the bed. I spent the night pushing myself back into position, fighting a losing battle with gravity.
Lesson #2: Always consider the activity level for your chosen location. You know who apparently wakes up early as hell on a Sunday? Fishermen. You know what makes a lot of noise right outside your van? Large trucks backing boats into the water with spotters shouting directions from behind. When I arrived just after sunset the night before, it was peaceful and quiet. It seemed like a great spot to get some sleep. But I should have considered what that area was used for.
Lesson #3: Have a pee plan. We’re friends now, so I’ll share a personal fact about myself. I generally have to urinate after I wake up in the morning. TMI? I don’t know, I think it’s a fairly basic biological certainty for most people. At night, with nobody around, as a man…it was pretty easy to go to the bathroom. I walked to the edge of the lot and peed in the grass. Now, is that ok to do? I don’t know. It felt pretty harmless. Maybe it would be frowned upon if you asked a cop or the person who manages the property. But I didn’t want to get uromycitisis poisoning. The point is, I hadn’t considered it that night but it didn’t pose much of a problem. The next morning, however, when there were roughly 20 people milling about the parking lot, that was a different story. I’ll admit at this point that I have a toilet in my van, but I was pretty much terrified of using it for fear of making it smell like a port-o-potty right at the beginning of the trip. These problems can be avoided with just a little planning.
So went my first night in the van. I didn’t get a lot of sleep, but I did get a lot of good experience that would pay dividends for the rest of the trip. So many more lessons were coming, but I won’t get into those now. For the most part, the first overnight was a success. I’d parked, slept, eaten in the van and I was more than 4 hours from home. I pulled out of that boat launch parking area feeling pretty good. Because so often, fear or anxiety are rooted in the simple fact that you don’t understand what’s in front of you or how you’re going to handle it. With a day of driving and a night of parking behind me, I realized I now understood what was in front of me. The terrain would change, the locations would differ, I’d experience new things. But at a basic level, this trip was driving and parking. Wash, rinse, repeat. So I put my sunglasses on, turned up the music and started to sing along. I got this.
Oh, so THIS is what a mid-life crisis is
A brief look into the motivation behind buying a van, taking a drive and getting lost
“It's not about what happened in the past or what you think might happen in the future. It's about the ride for Christ’s sake! There's no point going through all this crap if you’re not going to enjoy the ride. And you know what, when you least expect it something great might come along. Something better than you even planned for.” –Along Came Polly
I recently had a very important relationship come to an end. That's as much as I'm going to say about it, because I'm a private person. But, it had to be stated because it was the catalyst for an existential crisis that happened to come right around the mid-point of my life. So it goes. It is what it is. Shit happens. Choose your tired platitude, copy/paste for effect.
I'm 39 years old, which seemed too young for a mid-life crisis until I did some Googling and realized I'm getting old. Pretty rude way to find out. When I think of my family history, it actually checks out. Taylors seem to drop out of the race around 80 often enough.
The mid-life crisis is a pop culture favorite, a trope played out in cinema, television, music and more recently memes. In almost all cases, it's men who suffer from this indignity, not women. Usually we see it as a character dressing differently or dying their hair or buying a sports car. But I already had a sports car, so I went the other way and bought a van. Not just any van, but a converted campervan. You know, the kind that spent most of its life delivering water jugs or newspapers or mail. Then some young person buys it, slaps some flooring over the scratched metal, screws in some cabinets and a makeshift bed and sells their posessions to start living "van life". At least, that's the sterotype.
We don't know each other yet, so let me tell you a couple of things about me. I started traveling internationally in 2013 and fell in love with it almost immediately. After a couple of trips, I wanted a better way to capture memories of the cool things I was seeing, so I bought my first camera. In short order, I also fell in love with photography. So for me, travel and photography are inextricably linked. Fast forward more than a decade and thousands of photos later and I'd built up a catalog I thought maybe I could show off and even sell as a little side hustle. I kept that idea in the back of my head for a while, never really doing anything to pursue it. Enter the mid-life crisis.
At this point I think I should define mid-life crisis so we're all thinking about the same thing. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as: "an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early middle age." Yeah that feels about right. Let's look at an alternative definition from our friends at Webster: "a period of emotional turmoil in middle age characterized especially by a strong desire for change." If we combine both of those definitions, which are pretty similar, I'd say it hits the nail on the head for what I'm going through. It's kind of a kick in the head to go through your life feeling like you're an individual who does things differently only to realize you're so much like everyone else that you run into a common problem right on schedule and the basic dictionary definition makes you feel like "this Webster guy really GETS me". Life can be disappointing that way.
You can see where this is going by now. I ran smack into a period of emotional turmoil, with the whole checklist of symptoms. I felt directionless. Incapable. Bored. Uninspired. When I recognized what was going on, I said screw it, I'm going to embrace this thing. So I tried combining some things I'm passionate about in hopes that it would stir my soul and clear my head. I started learning about camper vans to understand what I wanted in mine. I mapped out a loose path to follow, based around visiting national parks. I bought some more memory cards, packed up my camera gear and embarked on a month long road trip. I decided that blogging about my trip as I was on it would be a great way to supplement the photo gallery on my shiny new website.
So come on. Let's point ourselves into the storm and experience this mid-life crisis together. Maybe you can learn something so you can have more fun with yours. Or maybe you survived one already and you want the opportunity to shake your head at mine. I'm ok with that. If change is what this crisis wants, then moving out of my nice, spacious, comfortable house and into a cramped van outta do the trick.