“Yes, I live in a van and I love it. In fact, I will never go back to living in a traditional sticks and bricks home.”
Those are the words of my new friend Kurt, whom I met a few months ago in Florida while traveling in my Class C motor home. Kurt went on to tell me he is semi-retired, is divorced and his kids are grown, so he doesn’t have the family thing to worry about. Kurt sold his home and decided he wanted to travel this great country and enjoy all it has to offer. Kurt is one of the thousands of people; men and women who have taken up this lifestyle.
I had no idea there were so many happy nomads in this country until I began doing my research on the subject.
YouTube is an awesome research tool for just about anything and the RV Lifestyle, specifically van dwelling, is no different. Van dwelling is a term that a lot of people, including myself had not heard much about.
Kurt offered to give me a tour of his van, which is a non-descript Chevrolet Express work van, or so it appears from the outside. It’s a basic white with regular wheels and tires and has a rack on top. Kurt tells me he installed the rack so he could carry his bicycle if he desired and it doubles as a protector for his solar panels he has installed under the rack. Kurt chose this particular type van because of it being a stealthy type vehicle that when anyone seeing it parked on a city street, would think it’s a contractor vehicle, that no one is living in. It has no windows except for the 2 front door windows and windshield. Kurt has installed a black-out curtain behind the seats so no one is able to see inside the windows beyond the front seats and into his living space. Kurt opens the side doors revealing a very nicely built small home. He has a regular sized bed, a small work space for his kitchen including a small sink and water faucet, a small (12 Volt DC) Dometic refrigerator and some small cabinets and a porta-potty. He also has a small one-burner butane/propane stove for cooking that he has stored in one of his cabinets. Granted, Kurt is not able to stand erect in the van, but for the past year he has been living in the van, he has had no problems. If weather permits (which it does the majority of the time because Kurt follows the warm weather), Kurt does his cooking outdoors.
I asked Kurt why the van. He explained that when he was married, he just found himself buying things he did not need. Those things had to have a place to be stored in. When he got his divorce, he said he sat down and did some long hard thinking about what he wanted from here on out. He came up with the idea to become a minimalist and get rid of all the things he had accumulated over the years. He sold or gave away all his possessions except for some of his clothes, his cell phone and laptop computer and bicycle. He bought this van and hit the road and in his words – never looked back. He laughed and said it took him just a few short days to realize he no longer missed TV nor any of his other possessions.
I met Kurt in an RV campground in central Florida. He explained he rarely stays at “paid” campgrounds, but will on occasion when he needs to do some laundry and grab a nice hot shower, otherwise he stays at free camping sites. After visiting with Kurt for a couple of days, I began to think of the van idea myself. Here I am in this large Class C motor home, getting about 9 miles per gallon of gas and wrestling it around the country and suddenly realized, I don’t need this big of an RV for myself.
A week later, I’m back home and the first thing I did was list my RV on Craigslist. It sold about a month later. You know what the second thing I did was? Yep, I bought a van. I’m now in the process of building it out the way I want it. I found lots of van build-out plans on YouTube and I’m already preparing for my first big adventure in my van…
Stay tuned for my next post and my big adventure…
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Until next time…
