Why We Chose VanLife

Ever since we started dating wayyy back when we were 16, we dreamed of living an adventurous life together. We decided very early on that we didn’t want to live an “ordinary” life.

We’ve always been a great team because Janna is a DREAMER and Austin is a DO’ER. So together, we can get sh!t done.

When we got engaged we began really thinking about what we wanted to do with the first couple years of our life together. We had no idea what to do, but we knew we weren’t ready to “settle down” yet. So we started researching. We looked into backpacking across Europe, living abroad, and enrolling in a volunteer around the world program.

But nothing felt “right”.

One day, Janna was scrolling through Instagram and saw a couple living and traveling in a self converted, self sustainable van. We were BLOWN away by this idea. We had never seen anything like it and we had to know more.

We spent the next few weeks researching like MAD MEN. We watched what felt like thousands of hours of youtube videos of couples living in vans and how it worked. The videos titled “why van life may not be for you” or “10 things we hate about van life” always caught our attention. But nothing the van lifers said really turned us off; in fact, some of the things urged us to pursue it even more! We craved a challenge and an adventure.

We loved the idea of living a minimalist life and being “off grid”. Well, we should say JANNA loved this idea. Austin is a little more of a hoarder and has a harder time giving away his stuff LOL.

We also had no idea how we were going to do it. Neither of us had remote jobs or any idea what a “remote job” actually meant.

Nonetheless, one June morning we decided to take the leap. We decided we would figure it out together and we started looking for vans to buy!

We bought our beautiful Guinevere in July of 2019. She was used as a laundry delivery van for most of her life until she was in an accident (so we got her for a steal!).

So why VanLife?

We loved the idea of the flexibility and being on our own time. Living in a van, we can essentially live WHEREVER we want for however LONG we want.

And the idea that we could drive back to Colorado if we ever needed to gave us a peace of mind.

Living in a van and traveling in the U.S felt like a great and easy(ish) introduction to traveling full-time.

And who knows whats next! Although we are still new to VanLife, we’ve already talked about the possibility of shipping our van to Europe and living and traveling out of our van there!

So stay tuned, and follow us along on our crazy journey.