San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
LONELINESS, CASHFLOW, PARKING.
BENEATH THE GLOSSY VENEER OF LIVING ON WHEELS
The road trip is an iconic American tradition. But what if the road trip never had to end? That’s the basic idea behind #vanlife, an Instagram hashtag coined in 2011 that has become synonymous with a trendy lifestyle as well as a lucrative brand. Vanlife has a number of recurring tropes — beautiful young people, yoga on the beach, do-it-yourself van improvements — but the unifying theme of vanlife is right there in the name: At the end of the day, you live in a van.
To skeptics, this may conjure the difficult circumstances Chris Farley turned into a catchphrase on “Saturday Night Live” back in the 1990s: “I am 35 years old, I am divorced, and I live in a van down by the river!” But on social media and in the campgrounds and parking lots where vanlifers congregate, the lifestyle has acquired a sense of romance and even glamour. To its adherents, vanlife means freedom from some of the constraints of modern life.
Kathleen Morton, 32, a Denver-based vanlifer with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, summed up this sentiment in a recent post: “It’s hard to envision what it’s like to pay rent and sleep in a normal bed. My form of entertainment is my dog and watching the sunset. This van thing might not be for everyone, but for me, this is the happiest I’ve felt yet.”
Posts like this are common among vanlifers. Morton’s Instagram archive is a blur of mountain landscapes, forest retreats, and smiling fellow travelers showing off their tricked-out vans. But Morton is quick to admit that vanlife isn’t all sunsets and sing-alongs. Below, she and several other vanlifers share challenges they face in exchange for the freedom and mobility of life on the road.
Loneliness
Half the fun of living in a van is the ability to travel to new and exciting locales. But in practice, that means a lot of driving down lonely highways to get someplace where you might not know anybody.
“It can be kind of isolating,” says Morton, who has been living in a van for a year and half after several years in a tiny house. “When I first moved into my van, my friends back home didn’t really get it. They worried I was in financial trouble.” While her social media activity touts the joys and challenges of vanlife, it’s intended not as a brag so much as a beacon to connect with like-minded people.
This issue can be acute for solo travelers like Morton, but it also applies to those who travel in pairs. Andrea Laue and Brian King, a married couple in their early 40s, have made a number of short-term friends in their travels, but no lasting bonds. “There are people who are way more extroverted than we are,” King laughs. “It’s probably easier for them to make friends, and more important to them.”
Income
Living in a van can save you a lot in rent and utilities, but vanlifers still have to make enough money for food, gas and life’s other necessities. Some of them — writers and coders, for example — have desk jobs they can do remotely. The more entrepreneurial set has found ways to monetize vanlife itself.
For the past year and a half, for instance, Morton has made her living by writing about vanlife and organizing meet-ups throughout the U.S. for Vanlife Diaries, an online hub for van-dwelling tips, news and profiles.
“The struggle is to balance work and play in this lifestyle,” Morton said. “We all want to be camped in faraway places, but the reality is we have to sustain ourselves.” This balance is visible in where Morton parks her van: “close to wildlife, but still with access to WiFi.”
Forrest Stevens, a 23-yearold YouTube personality and filmmaker, found his own way to make vanlife a part of his creative work. In 2017, he and his girlfriend bought a van and traveled along the West Coast from British Columbia down to Southern California. Along the way, he noticed it wasn’t always easy to find a legal place to park overnight, and hot showers were few and far between. The trip inspired him to produce a documentary called “The Reality of #Vanlife.” He is now trying to sell the film to a distributor.
It’s also possible to partake in vanlife without going full vagrant. Laue and King, for instance, keep an apartment in San Mateo even as they pour time and money into their Ram ProMaster van. They get their vanlife fix on the weekends because hitting the road full time isn’t an option at the moment — King works in online retail operations in a brick-and-mortar office; Laue, a photographer, has more flexible hours but also relies in part on the gigs to be found in a major metropolitan area.
Parking
In making his documentary, Stevens originally set out to ask whether vanlife could replace, as he put it, “the American dream of a house with a white picket fence” — that is, whether vanlife could provide the stability and sanctuary of more conventional lodging in the long term. The answer, in his eyes, was a resounding no.
“I definitely think vanlife is overglamorized,” Stevens says. “Instagram only shows a snapshot of the day. But for every picture, you have to ask: How long have they been waiting for the right lighting? Are they always parked on the beach, or do they have to go hunt for a parking lot that night?”
Laue and King usually have a specific destination in mind when they get in the van. It’s back in the Bay Area where parking is a headache. Their van is a little too tall to legally park on the street in San Mateo, so they pay $180 each month for a parking spot at a storage facility near their apartment.
Tight quarters
“We sleep better in the van than we do in our apartment,” Laue says, not least because her and King’s apartment adjoins a stretch of Caltrain tracks. On the other hand, each spouse is rather tall — an inconvenient quality in a van. Whether you call it cramped or cozy, this tight fit figures largely in their online identity. Their shared Instagram handle, “12foot4,” is derived from their combined heights.
Morton shares her van with her dog and has no complaints so far. She also noted another layer of proximity that occurs at the vanlife meet-ups that she organizes. “You don’t have fences around your house, like you would in a neighborhood,” she points out. “People constantly invite into their houses” — by which she means vans. “Everybody is sleeping in each other’s backyards and front yards.”
Tinkering and repairs
One of the things that distinguishes vanlife from other forms of travel is the proud culture of tinkering and DIY modifications. After buying their van in 2015, Laue and King spent the next eight months insulating the walls, building a sleeping platform and suspending cabinets from the ceiling, along with a host of other changes that gradually turned a nondescript cargo van into a home away from home.
“I can’t believe I’m about to drill a big hole in this thing we paid all this money for!” King recalls thinking just before installing a cabinet. “When you know you’re going to put a lot of money into the build,” his wife adds, “you don’t want to have to set aside $10,000 for a new transmission at the same time.”
Aside from the custom interior projects, there is also the motor to think about. “I’ve actually learned how to do mechanics,” Morton says proudly. She’s on her third van, a 1987 Toyota, after two others gave out — once stranding her. “But if I hadn’t broken down in an area without cell service,” she reasons, “I wouldn’t have met some incredible people.”
Stevens’ film profiles a range of vanlifers and periodically probes whether their lifestyle is sustainable. The vanlifers I spoke with offered mixed responses.
“This does not feel temporary,” Laue said. Her husband added, “I expect to drive this van till it can’t be driven anymore. And then we’ll build another one.”
Morton, on the other hand, sees a life beyond her vanlife someday. “It’s a beautiful way to live,” she said, “and it’s definitely something that you can make work. But for me personally, I need a home base.” In the future, Morton said, she sees herself owning a piece of land, maybe in Colorado: “It’d be a place to park my van in one spot. I’d build a greenhouse somewhere. And maybe a bathroom.”
Morton is currently writing a book about vanlife, and ironically she finds she gets more work done when she leaves her van in park.
“If you’d asked me a couple years ago whether vanlife was sustainable, my answer would have been different,” she says. “But now, because I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve been feeling a need to rest.”
This is the beauty of vanlife: It forces us to look our fantasies in the eye. It is an escape to nature, painstakingly cataloged on smartphones. It is a home that can go anywhere, but park nowhere. Like a rickety old van straddling the center line, vanlife sits at the boundary between the things that sustain us, and the things we can sustain.