Being from Lafayette, LA, I began on a path much like that of the average southerner; finish high school, go to college, and then get a job. While the career of a traveling sales rep in the skateboard/apparel industry was much different than the average person, it was still the same life outline that I was following. The next bullet point on that outline was to get married and then buy a house to settle. As time passed, I saw many of my peers doing what they thought they were supposed to do, much like myself, and then ending up in a place where they weren’t any happier than they were before they had reached those bullet points. Over the years I began to realize that what I wanted, what truly made me feel alive, was to see as much as I could on this beautiful planet we all call home.

Several years back I read an article that sparked something in me. The general point of the article based on a study was this: “As a child the years in a person’s life seem to pass much more slowly than the years in adulthood. The reason for this is that new experiences cause the brain to slow down the passing of time...” I decided right there that what I needed to focus on in my life was constantly experiencing something new. My whole life my older friends have told me this same statement in many different wordings: “Enjoy it, because life goes by fast.” Hearing those words echo in my mind and learning that new experiences help to slow life down, I understood why I loved traveling and seeing different parts of The World so much. Now I just needed to figure out how to maximize merging those two points.

Wanting to travel and see the world, is not a unique feeling. I would wager that the vast majority of people have similar feelings of wanderlust at different levels of intensity. More times than not, what tends to stop people from doing something where they can travel constantly is either a monetary constraint, a constraint caused by previous obligations, or a mixture of the two. I believe that if people could travel inexpensively and could do it in a way where they weren’t disregarding any of their previous obligations/responsibilities, most everyone would love to travel more often than not.

For me, this was when living in a van really started to make sense. I began to actually think of this life, not as giving up so many things, but I began to think of it as how much life I would actually gain. So there it was. That was the point where day dreaming about living in a van became a commonality for me. It still seemed so crazy and impossible to me at the time, but I began to dream. Dreaming led me to the idea of giving that dream a small bit of fuel. I thought “maybe I can rent one of these vans and try it out on a little vacation.” So that’s what I did. In November of 2016 I rented a camper van and went on a trip up Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Portland and back. I was with my girlfriend at the time, and we spent three weeks living in a van while seeing the sights the west coast had to offer. While the trip wasn’t perfect sunshine and rainbows, and my ex and I had some issues much like any other normal couple, I ended that trip with an invaluable bit of knowledge; “I can do this.”

Being armed with “I can” is something that makes nearly any person a formidable opponent to anything that may stand in the way of achieving that person’s end goal. For me, my goal was now to find a way to live in a van and travel. I had all the mental tools to do it too. The hardest part of coming to “I can” was already done. Now I needed to make it happen.