Rolling out the van life
A work-life balance that allows for more freedom. easier mobility, a comfy place to sleep
Jocelyn Lees never set out to live in her van.
The 30-year-old Manitoba native has been tree planting every summer in B.C. for the last 10 years and until recently, spent every winter travelling — in places like Ecuador, Morocco and Australia.
“The nature of my job is that I’m always away from home, and then in the winters I was away,” Lees says. “So, when would I ever be in this house that I would pay to have?”
When her car broke down a few years ago, she decided it was time to make a life change.
Instead of paying for rent, she invested in a camper van, which gave her more mobility and a comfortable place to sleep during her summers in the woods. Her 1981 Dodge has been her home ever since. She plans to base herself in the Vancouver area this winter.
“Having my van is amazing,” she says. “I just wake up at the beach.”
Lees is part of a community of Canadians who often dub themselves “van-lifers.” They have a variety of motivations: a desire for adventure; frustration with expensive rental markets and precarious employment; and the possibility of social media fame.
Many Canadian van-lifers end up out west, often favouring Vancouver Island. Twenty-two-year-old Sacha Morin-Sirois described Tofino, B.C., as “literally, the end of the road.”
When Morin-Sirois travelled with his family as a young boy, he would dream of setting off on his own, sleeping in his van and surviving the elements.
“It’s mostly a call for freedom, I think,” he says.
He and his girlfriend left Gatineau, Que., in June in a van older than they are — it’s a 1991 model — with plans that weren’t much more specific than “head west.” They both wanted to integrate their travels with their chosen careers: Morin-Sirois, a chef, took on seasonal work picking fruit in the Okanagan and developed dishes using whatever was in season. His girlfriend, a writer, started a blog about their experiences and worked on her fiction.
Lisa Felepchuk and her partner Coleman Molnar, who lived in Toronto until a year- and-a-half ago, also incorporate their work into their van life. They offer content and social media services through their company Li et Co Media and organize their travels around making sure Wi-Fi is accessible. That’s occasionally meant skipping out on some places they wanted to visit.
“Last year, we were so close to the Mexican border and I regret not going into Baja,” Felepchuk says. “But the Wi-Fi was a big question for us, and we weren’t sure if we got down there what it would mean for us and for our business.
“I think finding that work-life balance is tricky for most people,” she says.
Adds Molnar: “The only difference between us and somebody who has a regular job and lives in a house is that we’re able to just take our jobs on vacation with us.”
Canada has its own social media stars, including “Van Man” Philippe Leblond, a model originally from Montreal. He now lives in Los Angeles and travels out of his van, taking trips he documents to his 164,000 Instagram followers.
Other van-lifers prefer to unplug completely, using money saved from previous jobs to finance a work-free experience. Adrian Myles, 38, goes home to Perth, Australia, to work as a sommelier every few years, which allows him to travel for a year or two without having to worry about money.
“People living this life aren’t sitting around talking about what was back at home,” says Myles, who was recently travelling through B.C.
“You can know someone for a month and never know what their job was, because you don’t ask, because it doesn’t matter.”
Others eschew social media completely. Myles says he used to take a lot of photos to document the places he visited. But he kept feeling that the urge to compose a perfect shot was distracting him from the natural beauty he had travelled to see.
Morin-Sirois says he and his girlfriend once got in a fight because she kept wistfully looking at other people’s social media photos while they were on their own trip.
“I told her, ‘Why are you looking at other people’s lives? Just be here and enjoy it,’ ” he says. “People want what they don’t have, and that’s really not my mentality at all.”