I was raised on road trips, with the best always being weeks-long trekking across the American West. They usually ended with all of our neatly packed stuff spread out in every corner of my parents’ van. A bed that my dad constructed in the back for my brother and me to hang out on became a sea of scattered books, discarded ripe socks, and torn candy wrappers covered in melted chocolate.
Ah, good times.
On Instagram, road-trip life has taken the more trendy form of vanlife culture—adventurous travel by living in customized vans. Posts frequently include remodeled Sprinter vans with rear doors opened and a couple laying on a bed facing picturesque scenery. There are beautiful galley kitchens with subway tiles and wood floors. It always looks better than my first Chicago apartment.
A closer look at the reality of vanlife, however, shows that it isn’t always as glamorous as it appears on Instagram. For those dedicated to it, vanlife is a complicated mix that includes a daily frustration with the simplest of things, while also providing opportunities for personal discovery, community building, and activism.
Vanlife has grown in popularity in recent years, sometimes for the love of adventure and sometimes just out of necessity. One survey from the end of 2020, for example, showed that 35 percent of Americans were “drawn to van life to be outdoors more,” while 72 percent “would trade their home for van life to pay off debt.” With films like Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning Nomadland, vanlife is now closer to being a mainstream idea.
My first real look at vanlife outside of Instagram came a few years ago from someone I met online. He had my exact first and last name, also ended up in the news sometimes, and, as it turned out, he’s a cousin I’ve never met in real life. (You may know him as the hero who recently 3D-printed the Simpsons’ TV replica.)
That other, younger Brandon Withrow, and his partner, Lindsay, set out on the road to see every national park they could. So far, that includes 50 national parks, 24 national monuments, 14 national forests, 105 cities, 52 museums, and 64 roadside attractions. During that time, they traveled over 50,000 miles, got engaged, and then married—all the time living out of 60 square feet. Vanlife for them was a series of milestones in life. COVID-19 led them to cut back on vanlife living, but they still get out a couple months a year.
At the time, I too was doing long, but still much shorter, road trips in my SUV to national parks. The American West was apparently being trampled by Brandon Withrows back then.
Behind those experiences, however, vanlife can be a difficult way to live.
As one post on the popular aggregate Instagram account Project Vanlife shows, life on the road also comes with its real frustrations and challenges. Project Vanlife often reshares more polished vanlife posts—gorgeous van remodels parked along perfect scenery. One reshare, however—a post from Janna and Austin Jenkins (@austinandjanna) on “The things about VanLife not usually shown on Instagram”—became a moment of community therapy for vanlifers happy for some realness on Instagram.
Comments began flooding the post about that reality, which includes many nights spent in parking lots or truck stops, moldy milk, being trapped with farts in close quarters, mosquitoes, horseflies, wasps, cold vans, boiling hot vans, broken-down vans, and wonky banana hammocks. (To keep fruit from being bruised, they usually hang them in over-the-counter hammocks, though they often fall out and get bruised anyway.)
Getting into vanlife means thinking through all of the contingencies. While some vans are tricked-out luxury stays that are just shy of an RV, for example, not all can find the space for a toilet in their small home, meaning they store “pee bottles,” and find creative ways to handle bodily waste when miles from a rest area.
“The poop in a bag,” wrote user onemanonevan. “Another user (jean._muir) replied, “You know we thinking [sic] of just using dog bags instead of buying a fancy toilet.”
For my cousin, preparation meant a thorough checklist before driving anywhere. “We kept a ‘Preflight checklist’ next to the steering wheel,” he told me, “to make sure we didn’t forget to do anything before moving the van: lock the drawers, lock the cabinets, nothing on the counter, close the vent, nothing on the roof.”
“Definitely not for every couple,” Janna Jenkins told me when I reached out to ask if it was worth it. The Jenkins’ account often dispels the myths of vanlife perfection with videos of insider vanlife moments.
“Living in 70 square feet by yourself is a challenge, let alone with another person! It’s made our relationship flourish and really brought us closer together, but we’ve seen couples that have been torn apart.”
(Interviews for this article were conducted before the tragic murder of vanlifer Gabby Petito by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie.)
The couple heard about vanlife on Instagram in March of 2019, when they were first married and looking for long-term travel options. Nine months later, and after fixing up their van, they were on the road and have been doing it for more than a year.
“VanLife,” Jenkins told me, “(at least in our experience) is 50 percent of what you see on Instagram and 50 percent of what you don’t see. We really do spend half of our nights in beautiful spots with ocean views or in lush forests, but we also spend half of our nights in Walmart parking lots or at truck stops.”
On the road, there are those things you can plan for, Jenkins said, like having insurance to cover everything, and those you cannot, like discovering, as she did, that she’s severely allergic to bee stings and having to go to the emergency room—hoping that your insurance will cover it all.
For others, however, vanlife is a less stressful, part-time thing.
Based out of Switzerland, Katharina and Simon Foster (exploring.fosters) are part-time vanlifers, traveling on weekends and holidays with their two dogs. Vanlife, they said, is the “perfect investment” for traveling with dogs, though they admit that dog hair gets everywhere when you live in a small space.
“For us, as passionate hikers,” they add, vanlife is “very convenient” for sleeping “at the starting point of a hike so we can start very early and enjoy the peace and quiet at the mountain top.”
Nomadic life isn’t perfect, they admit. They find that camping in the outdoors is not always as idyllic as Instagram shows. Frequently, spots where they park to camp are littered, sometimes with human excrement and toilet paper. Despite those surprises, they say it’s “totally addictive.”
For many, though, getting into vanlife is about rediscovering oneself..
“Abi [Rodriguez] and I started the process of vanlife in early 2017,” said Nat Rodriguez. (The couple goes by @letsplayrideandseek on Instagram.) Nat Rodriguez was a sous chef and was ready for a change. “We did some research and purchased the van. We worked to save money and build-out the van in 2018. Abi ended the lease on her photography studio and I quit my job and we took off [in] February of 2019.”
“Unfortunately, the majority of what you see portrayed on the platform is a very small part of vanlife,” Rodriguez told me.
“That is by no means to take away from the luxury of getting to park up at a spot with stunning views while enjoying a beautiful sunset with your doors open. That absolutely happens, and Abi and I are fortunate to have called pretty much any landscape you can think of our backyard.” There is, however, a perpetual hustle of the everyday, she added, like getting your mail, not being able to shower for long periods, finding places to sleep, tracking water and energy supplies, or locating WiFi.
Still, they say it’s worth it.
“The other side of that is getting to have unique experiences,” she said, adding “absolute freedom, gaining some of the most meaningful relationships you’ll ever have, seeing the beauty of the country and the world, growing as a person, and overall, living intentionally. Abi and I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.”
The couple also founded Van Life Pride (@vanlifepride) to “celebrate queer nomads” and to create a “safe space for LGBTQIA+ nomads & allies to connect.”
Meaningful relationships with other nomads on the road sometimes take the form of planned events. In early 2022, for example, they hosted their first-ever Van Life Pride gathering, following that up with joining Skooliepalooza, a large gathering of converted school buses, vans, and RVs.
Vanlife is full of diversity, but that diversity often doesn’t make it on those aggregate accounts, which leads to a serious gap in representation online. Similar accounts like, Diversify Vanlife (@diversify.vanlife), are also stepping forward to represent underrepresented people in vanlife.
Vanlife, then, can be a world that enables individuals to put their full efforts into important issues close to home.
Melissa Moses, an indigenous woman in Canada, got into vanlife in June of 2020 when she bought her 1993 Chevrolet G20 Chevy Van.
“I adore traveling and my van has all the elements of home,” she told me. She’s lived out of a suitcase, a car, a truck, a tall ship, liveaboard dive boats, multimillion-dollar yachts, and RVs.
Vanlife for her is instrumental to her activism. “The reason I decided to begin my van life experience is because of my work in teaching self-defense to First Nations communities and advocating indigenous women’s rights. I returned home after traveling abroad for 15 years because of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.”
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is a Canadian governmental report that came after years of indigenous voices calling for Canada to look into the disproportionate numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada and the policies that enable that injustice.
“My elders in my communities asked me to return home to teach self-defense to all our First Nations Bands in British Columbia,” she said. “The Union of BC Indian Chiefs elected me as their Women’s Representative. I represent over 150 First Nations Bands in British Columbia.”
Vanlife makes her life as an instructor in self-defense affordable, she says, and it opens the doors for her to “reach all the First Nations Bands in BC, see the world, learn about myself, and refocus on what really matters in my life.”
But how do people afford to live vanlife? Some, like my cousin, are digital nomads, where freelancing or a freer corporate policy allow for working on the road.
The Jenkinses, for example, own an axe-throwing bar in Northern Colorado. A partner helps run it and they manage the rest of the business from the road.
Others bring their fundamental talents to the physical locations they are visiting.
Nat and Abi work when necessary, once setting up a pop-up restaurant on the beach in Baja California Sur, Mexico. “We camped for a month on this surfer beach and created a restaurant with two other campers we met. We became close friends. We would make a menu, sell tickets, and cook for an intimate sold-out crowd, cooking out of our rigs and over a fire while watching gray whales right at the edge of the shoreline.”
While it is clear that vanlife is not always the flawless life in the perfect photo of the perfect setting, it is also clear that it has its amazing moments like these that keep many returning to their vans.
“One good thing we’ve experienced on the road,” said the Fosters, “is how you suddenly become part of a community.” While on the road, they add, “we were stopped by a family whose car was stuck in the roadside ditch. We were able to pull them out and we will never forget their happy and thankful faces. We know [that] if one day our van will have a breakdown, someone will help us out.”
Similarly, last year, Moses had her own experience that stays with her. She was invited to witness the “Commemoration Memorial Healing Totem Pole Raising on unceded Kitsumkalum territory, honouring Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls/2SLGBTQ.”
She showed up in her van, which had no heat at the time. They shared traditional foods, including sockeye salmon. In her territory to the south, she said, they had to stop harvesting sockeye salmon years ago due to low numbers, so it was a special moment to have some.
“I ate the sockeye salmon like it was my last meal,” she said “They all looked at me concerned because I was eating like I was starving.” Before she left they packed her freezing van with salmon to take back home to her family.
“My van smelled of fish for days, but it was worth it.”
