So why the heck did we choose to buy a van, build it out and live in it? Not to get all deep but it’s more like vanlife chose us…
Flashback to July 2013, here is a background of our story. Ethan and I met at a musical festival called Soulfest which took place on a mountain in New Hampshire (where we both grew up). After the festival, we stayed in touch but we hadn’t seen each other since, so in July 2015 we finally decided to hang out. We started dating two weeks later in August 2015. We knew right off the bat that God had placed us together and we got engaged 5 months later in December 2015. Since the start of our relationship, we were always going on roadtrips and adventuring. Since we lived almost 2 hours away from each other, we looked forward to the weekends and whatever new beach we would explore up the coast of Maine. Looking back, it feels like most of our relationship and definitely some of the best memories have been in a car.
I never really wanted a typical wedding. It just seemed like too much stress and money for one day and that wasn’t my style. I knew if I had a wedding I would get caught up in trying to please everyone and lose sight of what the whole day was really about. So I explained to Ethan why I thought eloping would be the best option for us and he was on board. We both knew we wanted to get married on a mountain since hiking is a big part of our lives but also since we met on a mountain. We also knew we wanted it to be somewhere we both had never been to before, because of our love of adventure. So May 28, 2016 we had a little ceremony in New Hampshire for immediate family and then we flew to Washington state. We had a photographer booked that I had been following on Instagram for a while who was based out of Seattle. I had talked to him the month before and had asked him if there were any locations he had been wanting to shoot, the only requirement was that it was on a mountain. He had mentioned a spot that he had never hiked before in Mount Rainier National Park. We stayed in the cutest off-grid A-frame in the middle of nowhere outside the park. May 31, 2016, we hiked up to High Rock Lookout (yes, in my wedding dress!). I remember every detail about that day, siting outside drinking coffee together, Ethan picking me flowers be the river outside our cabin while I got my hair and makeup done, oh and even all of us getting lost trying to find the trailhead (LOL). Our wedding was the most stress free, beautiful day.
November 2016 we moved to Nashville to follow our dreams in the music industry. We love Nashville and it is one of our favorite cities but with the city growing so much within recent years it also meant rent prices were growing along with it. So for over 2 years we worked many different jobs, while still trying to follow our dreams..and pay rent. There were many months where we wondered how we were going to pay it on top of student loans and other bills. It seemed like most of our income was going toward rent, so one month we sat down and looked at our budget and saw how much we actually spent in rent in 2 years and it made us sick to our stomachs. Almost $30,000 in 2 years. Just thinking of how many places we could have travelled, the debt we could have paid off with that money was enough for us to say enough is enough and look into other options. We knew we weren’t in the place financially to even think about buying a house, plus we really didn’t want to feel ‘stuck’ in one place. I had casually joked for a while saying that we should just live in a van. I think it’s just always been in my personality, I’m a enneagram type 5 and a minimalist. I also lived in a car with my best friend traveling around the U.S. for a month so I knew I could do it. But I had never really thought about it seriously until early 2018 when we were stressed about money and bills and Ethan just said “what about vanlife?” and showed me a video on youtube. From then on I became obsessed with watching videos of people living vanlife and alternative lifestyles. I knew this was the lifestyle for us. It was freedom. Freedom from the status quo, freedom from 9-5s and the “American Dream”. We had both been embracing minimalism for a while so we already didn’t have many things, we also were wanting to live a more sustainable lifestyle, and we were wanting to travel more – it just made sense. So we said life is too short to wait, moved out of our apartment, sold everything we owned and moved in with some friends while we saved up for a van. January 2019 we bought our van, Van Halen.
I could go on and on about why we chose this lifestyle, but deep down when God lays something on your heart, you just do it because His plan for our lives is so much greater than what we can ever imagine. But so often we get lost in the “American Dream”. We lose focus on purpose and get lost in careers and materials things. This is something we don’t ever want to happen to us. We want to live a simple life, spend every day together, experience different cultures and meet new people. We want to inspire others to consume less and create more. We want to live like when we were dating, didn’t have any bills and our biggest worry was deciding which beach we were going to that weekend.
So we decided to take our love for road trips and adventure and turn it into full time living.