Day 52: Learnings After One Month of Van Living
In addition to reflecting on learnings after one week of van living, below are new learnings after one month of living and traveling in a van.
Van life is easy. I perceived it as difficult during the first few weeks, but this was because I was traveling to too many places while working. Now I stay in one place for a week during workweeks. This is what I did last week and working went as smoothly as it would if I was working in a house. Van life is also easy because I have most of the amenities I would in a house besides a washer and dryer. Water and space is also limited but, after acclimating to van life, I see that water and space are excessive in a house. These excesses make house life easier but a house can’t travel away on wheels in an instant. I can have comfort wherever I go. That’s easy living.
Van life is simpler than RV life. Traditional RVs have more house-like conveniences but you have to concern yourself with finding places that have dump stations, water hookups, and electric hookups. I tried meeting up with someone in an RV. They talked about dump stations and hookups and it was a turnoff. All I have is gray water that I can dump virtually anywhere and the monthly bag of poop from the Laveo dry flush toilet. Other times I’m cat holing in the woods (pooping while squatting is much easier), showering from the sink hose, or bathing in a pond. This is simpler. Vans are also more discreet than RVs and take up less space. This is simpler for trying to remain undetected when camping where you’re not supposed to, which I plan on doing in the near future. I need to redeem myself.
Nature can feel unsettling. I was living in suburbia and cities where there was always the sound of cars, neighbors, streetlights, televisions, appliances, and big electric boxes running. There was also the physical presence of these people and things. They were the breath of suburbs and cities. In the last few weeks, I have been living mostly in wooded areas where animals, trees, and wind are the breath. People too, but less so. This is more natural but often unsettling to my city boy mind. Up until recently, I would leave the wooded area every day in the late morning or early afternoon to go to a Starbucks or suburban park. The habit to be around city breath rather than nature breath is still present but I’m working on finding a balance between the two. I do like the breath of both.
It takes a few weeks to understand a van’s idiosyncrasies. Some issues arose with the van customization early on. With the awning, electrical system, plumbing, TV mount, and keeping everything in place while driving. But in the last week nothing has needed investigated or repaired. I have learned to continuously repair some things — like the set screws on the TV that can come loose while driving and cause the TV to slide off its track — and learned to accept others — like the kitchen drawer that flies open when I make a left turn. The drawer issue is easy enough to fix, but work often precedes making trivial repairs like this. These trivial repairs can wait until I am in vacation mode and parked somewhere where there are tools and resources available, not like where I am now in a national forest.
It takes time to balance remote work life with van life. I’m still working on finding this balance. Some days I trade work time for laundromat time, exploration time, reparation time, grocery time, and whatever-else time, but this means working into the night time which I do not like. However, I have found balance in deciding not to camp in deep forests during workweeks. There simply is not enough cell reception in these places and they require me to travel into town for better internet service which is inefficient. During workweeks, I stay at Hipcamps that are just on the outskirts of suburbia where there is enough cell reception. I get the connected conveniences of suburbia and peace of nature. I love Hipcamps for this.
