Guy and Ann Junkins, it turns out, would’ve been better off if Guy had just gotten fired. When Comcast announced in March 2016 it was shuttering the Dover, New Hampshire, plant where he’d worked doing logistics and inventory since 2010, Guy—who was in his fifties at the time—expected to find his name on the chopping block. His friends and coworkers got sacked, netting small severance packages for their termination. So it seemed like a surprising stroke of good fortune when he found out he was one of only a handful of employees given the option to transfer to a different facility further down the road. He signed on.

It seemed to make sense at the time. The Junkinses had expenses—the mortgage they were finally getting close to paying off, two car payments, the loan on the Harley Davidson—and finding a new job in your mid fifties is no sure thing. A career change wasn’t in the cards. Guy had been doing warehouse work for decades, much closer to retirement than starting anew. Plus, he was a hard worker, and proud of it. Often he’d worked multiple jobs, sometimes even two full-time gigs, to make ends meet. “We weren’t living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “But we did need two paychecks to make it work.”

In the days and months of uncertainty leading up to the transfer, Guy had gotten hooked on watching YouTube videos, particularly the enthusiastic dispatches of Bob Wells, owner-operator of the semi-famous channel CheapRVLiving. Wells had been living in a vehicle for the better part of two decades, proselytizing the virtues of the lifestyle to anyone who’d click and listen. (Wells currently resides in a van, rendering the channel’s name a bit of a misnomer.)

The snow-capped peaks and virescent forested wilderness Wells broadcasted were compelling, sure, and his lengthy tutorials on van construction became a dependable resource once the Junkinses had purchased a van of their own. But it was buoyant evangelism about the lifestyle that sealed the deal. “Safety is an illusion,” Wells pronounced in one popular video. “What’s the point of prolonging a life you don’t enjoy when you can create a life that you love.” For Guy, that message resonated.

Meanwhile, he still had a job. But adjusting to life at the new plant proved challenging. Guy’s altered schedule and the added commute meant that he was spending at least two hours on the road every day, parrying semi trucks and racking up tolls on the harrowing New England highways. He was waking up at 3 am just to get in on time, and the physical and emotional burden of so many hours on the road was weighing heavy on him and Ann both. It didn’t take long before he realized he couldn’t continue to live like this. He quit.

Guy and Ann had always wanted to travel, and they’d imagined that once they hit those golden years, with the retirement money rolling in, they’d hit the road. Out of a job, that plan accelerated drastically. They cashed out Guy’s 401K and paid the penalty. They liquidated the equity in the house for cash—it sold in one day—and ditched the cars, the beloved Harley, and, then, everything else they owned in three epic yard sales. “Everything we own fits in 150 square feet,” he later said. “I don’t know whether to be ashamed or proud.”

Wells has become a kind of guru in the van-living world, dispensing advice on everything from finding stealth parking locations to the finer points of installing solar panels. Angie Smith

Some of that money became a used Ford E-250, a bulky, white cargo van which they spent the summer retrofitting for full-time living. It wasn’t their first choice for van-dwelling (the Nissan NV had caught Guy’s eye), but the price was right. They built a bed in the back, installed solar panels on the roof, and added a ceiling fan for ventilation, a Fantastic Fan, Ann’s favorite. They rigged a cookstove to the back hatch and pasted twin decals of a compass and a silhouetted treeline on each side of the van’s blank exterior. By August they had moved in, ready to strike out in the new home they’d christened “Forever Lost,” according to Guy, or “Miss Carry Van,” according to Ann.