Vanlife Reality: 13 Truths #Vanlife Doesn’t Tell You
My life is so amazing and carefree. All I ever do these days is stare longingly out my open back doors at the ocean and wear cheeky undies! #HomeIsWhereYouParkIt #VANLIFE!!!
If only it were so simple.
Now we’re not judging any of the lovely van life ladies out there showing off their amazing butts with cheeky undies (you do you, boo!). Personally, I’m more the “bundle up in layers of down skirts and frumpy stained sweaters in 20º weather” vanlife gal.
The reality of vanlife is a whole lot more complex than as seen through Instagram colored glasses.
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1. Finding free parking and wild camping is harder than you think.
We moved into the van, we were so looking forward to embracing the notion of living everywhere. #HomeIsWhereYouParkIt!… except that parking it kind of hard. Even in the middle of Alaska, the state with the largest land mass and smallest population, we had an absurd amount fo difficulty finding free, legal, and private parking places. Everywhere we went (even down remote backroads), we dealt with campsite poachers, crazy meth heads, and people calling the cops (okay that only happened once, but still).
When we left Alaska, there were fewer crazy people, sure, but parking is always something of a chore. Some places are definitely easier than others, but in some we’ve spend hours driving around looking for a parking place. Few things are more frustrating than driving around in the dark, exhausted from driving but unable to find anywhere that will let you stop doing it.
In cities especially, boondocking can actually be a little scary. Walmart is always a fallback, but we really recommend avoid it if possible, because they’re more often than not areas of somewhat shady folk. We’re proud to say we’ve never resorted to staying in a Walmart parking lot. We have, however, used Cracker Barrel on occasion and let us tell you… Cracker Barrel is clutch.
We also highly recommend using the iOverlander app. It’s a totally community contributed and frequently updated map of vanlife resources, from dumping to parking. It’s saved our butts on numerous occasions.
2. Things will break and need fixing… a lot.
Just because you’ve finished your van conversion doesn’t mean you should throw away your whole toolbox. You’re going to want to keep some basic tools around for on-the-go road repairs.
The first time we took our van down Buttermilk Road (which is a rocky, washboard nightmare) our extendable mirror fell off the wall. When we drove back down the road, the cabinet doors above the foot out bed fell off. Pretty much every time we drove that road, something rattled itself loose (until we eventually took to going, I kid you not, like 8 MPH down the ENTIRE ROAD).
Even if you stay off dirt roads, enough drive time on paved roads will still vibrate screws loose.
The takeaway: whether you’re mobbing down backroads of just chasing that endless horizon, constant motion is hard on your van. It’s also one of the biggest motivations to live in a van, so something’s gotta give. Just be prepared to fix some stuff. You may have to exercise some creative problem solving, but if you built the van yourself, you’ll probably know how to fix it.
The worse types of breaks are those in the vehicle itself. But those are to be expected when you drive your whole house thousands of miles a year. Be prepared for those with a sufficient tools for van safety and repair
3. Vanlife is a lot of hard work.
Sounds weird, we know. Living a lifestyle where you may or may not even have a job and yet it’s just as much work. Vanlife in and of itself is a full time job, because it demands intentionality for even the most simple of tasks. You’re always going things like finding water, parking, and dump stations (if you have an RV toilet). Every time you drive (even if just for a few blocks), you have to make sure your van is all secured and drive-ready.
When you have to relearn how to do things you’ve always taken for granted (running water, anyone?) just existing can be hard.
4. Some days are downright boring.
Long haul drive days aside, there are days when vanlife feels less like a never-ending adventure and more like sitting around in a doctor’s waiting room. Even without 9-to-5 jobs and a static place to live, you just can’t adventure every single day, and the days in between can get a bit dull. Image: what to do with your life without Hulu and Netflix! It probably seems unimaginable!
We’ve learned to love the idle time van life provides. We’ve gotten into things like mindfulness practice and yoga. We’ve read more books than we have collectively since college. But we didn’t get there right away. We spent a lot of days twirling out thumbs and twitching with the urge to be productive because we broke ourselves of the feeling that we always needed to be doing something. It’s still a work in progress.
To stave off boredom while you’re trying to find that perfect balance of living life to the fullest and just existing, find new hobbies! Music streaming services have been a blessing, and we swapped out Hulu and Netflix subscriptions for less data-intensive Audible and Kindle Unlimited memberships. Equally as entertaining, but a little less mindless.
5. Cold or rainy weather sucks.
No days are more boring than days of bad weather. Our first year in the van has been filled with some really tough weather induced conditions. Place after place, we’ve encountered above average heat that turned into below average snow and rain practically overnight. Locals tell us, “It’s usually not like this!” (but please, tell us again how climate change is a hoax).
Some of the most discouraging days have been those in which we’ve been trapped in the van, unable to go outside and climb, or even keep the door open because of precipitation. The difference between living everywhere and living in a cold metal husk truly is as simple as an open door. We’re in the process of picking out an awning for our van precisely so this isn’t as much of a problem.
Find vehicle awnings here: Amazon / EMS
As if the wet weren’t bad enough, wait until the cold sets in. Being a van life ski bum feels a whole lot less dreamy when you’re trying to figure out how to thaw your frozen water pipes and tanks. We never regretted cussing the summer heat so much as we did when we woke up to 10º temperatures to find out even the water inside our insulated Hydroflask growler had frozen. We won’t even mention how long it took for us to unthaw our Fusti stainless steel water tank (which at least won’t break like plastic when water expands into ice).
Despite the insulation in our van, we just don’t have a very good heating system at the moment, so really cold weather pretty much infantilizes us to laying in bed bundled up and miserable.
6. Mental health is super important.
Consistency is considered by some to be the most important factor for stress relief. Vanlife is a lot of things but consistent is just not one of them. Your life is an endless process of learning new routines, which are rarely the same from one day to the next. And let me tell you, it’s straight up stressful, and it’s stressful in different ways than you’re used to experiencing stress.
The stresses of new locations and feelings of displacement can wear on a person, as can being confined to a small space (especially with another person).
This stress is incredibly taxing on your mental health and well being, and unfortunately not enough people talk about it. Instead, you find yourself thinking things like, “Vanlife is awesome, right, so why am I depressed?” which only leads to even more depression. Been there, done that. Over the last nine months, Chris and I have both health with our fair share of issues, from anxiety to depression to really dangerous diet swings in order to achieve climbing weight.
We’ve really had to prioritize healthy eating habits and self care lately, which is hard to do in a van. You can’t exactly pour yourself a bubble bath and soak to the soothing sounds of Enya. Instead, fin what works for you. Maybe it’s taking a walk alone, or binge watching a guilty pleasure show. Maybe it’s getting stoned out of your mind and listening to a new album by your favorite artist (a personal favorite of mine). Sometimes, it might be so pressing that you get yourself a hotel or AirBnB once or twice a month just to have a break from the van.
Find what works for you, but take your mental health seriously. Just because you live in motion, doesn’t mean that shit doesn’t follow you.
7. There’s a big social stigma against vanlife.
Hopefully you’re at least marginally aware of this before moving into the van. If you were like us, you were made well aware of it each and every time you told a family member only to met with skeptical and slightly judgmental, “You’re moving into a VAN?”
For the most part, what people think of us doesn’t really bother us. We understand we’ve elected to live a lifestyle far removed from the norm. However, it does get challenging when people’s perceptions of your worth to society start to actually effect the ease with which you can just exist in a location.
Some places are NOT friendly to vanlifers. At all. In fact, most municipalities actually have laws against residing in your vehicle (which is f*cked up on a lot of levels). Parking, again, is where this typically manifests. In particularly unfriendly places, not only will the police work against you, but people will go out of their way to report people suspected of living in vans to the police.
Other places you might notice the stigma working against you is trying to get a job if you need to temporarily settle and make some money. For some reason, employers don’t like the idea of hiring someone without a physical address and the whole “I live in a van” is pretty effective interview buzzkill.
8. Your life becomes messy in every sense.
Your van can get especially messy if you have to unexpectedly slam on the brakes.
All those squeaky clean and organized vans you see on Instagram? Yeah those are SUPER staged with the intention of taking a photo. If vanlifers took genuinely spontaneous photos of their day to day life, no one would want to look at their pig stye of a home.
But you know what? We would all rather we out adventuring dawn til dusk that worry about keeping a clean van! So yeah, sometimes we get back from a long day of climbing and heap our chalky clothes and muddy shoes in a pile on the floor. We crash into bed so we can get up and do it all again the next day. Eventually, we get around to cleaning, but it doesn’t bother us much in the mean time.
Your standards of hygiene and cleanliness change once you live in a van (both personally and for your living space). As someone who was always super OCPD about the cleanliness of their house, this has been super liberating (and at times still a tad frustrating).
Embrace the title of dirtbag, and stop worrying about a little dirt.
9. Pests can infest your van.
Mice, meet vanlife. This was something I never even considered about living in a van. If our home was always moving, then surely critters and creepy crawlies (besides maybe the odd spider) wouldn’t be able to make a home.
Then we got a mouse. We killed it. Then we got another (though he mysteriously disappeared, which was honestly more unnerving than anything). After these critter conflicts, we learned that getting mice is a somewhat common problem for vanlifers and RV dwellers. The smell of food is enough to attract them, and the wall drainage holes of a van provide the perfect little tunnels in.
If you find yourself staying in forested areas frequently, it’s worth investing in a few traps, as well as practicing rodent prevention techniques. We store just about all of our food in plastic, airtight OXO containers which blocks odors and keeps mice out. The few exceptions are product and bread, which we just have to be mindful of watching for evidence of mice. Read out other post for more on pest prevention techniques.
10. Vanlife is more expensive than you might think
One of the biggest surprises for us was just how much our monthly expenses added up while living in the van. It’s easy to be allured by the beautiful notion of wiping that monthly mortgage payment or rent check off the table.
And yeah, it’s SUPER nice to not write a monthly check for $1,500, but our other expenses haven’t really changed. We still pay insurance and internet/phone bills. We have a van payment, gym memberships, and a somewhat expensive hobby. The van still needs repair and maintenance (in fact, more frequently than standard cars because we put miles on it so quickly). And when you’re not bringing in a steady paycheck, all those things amount to a lot more than they did before.
So while we’re saving a lot of money on rent, it’s all pretty relative given the decrease in income. Money stresses still exist. Even when you live in a van, money runs the world, which is something we’ve been grappling with over the last months as we try to strike the balance between financial security and freedom.
You definitely live more cheaply than we do, just as you can live much more expensively than us, too (we don’t eat out much or pay for campgrounds ever). Plus the fact that we stay in small town and rural locations means we don’t really have to pay for recreation. If urban vanlife is more your thing, be prepared to always be paying for entertainment.
Overall, we weren’t really prepared for the cost of vanlife, and found ourselves stopping to work and save up more money sooner than we initially anticipated.
11. Life goes on around you.
Vanlife kind of feels like you’re standing still, which if freeing at times and scary at others. As we both hit the downhill slide to 30, our social media feeds have been filled with friends getting married, having kids, getting promoted, you name it. And here we are living in a van, no idea really where we’re going to wake up tomorrow let alone having the foresight to put money into a 401(k).
Granted, we are 100% okay with this, but it’s hard not to feel like life is leaving you behind. Trust your gut and know that your life doesn’t exist by the timeline of anyone else.
12. You WILL hate it some days.
Vanlife isn’t fairy tale land. But hey, even fairy tales have the plot twist, the danger, the wicked witch, the bad guy. Just like life, there are good days and bad days, and vanlife tends to amplify both to the extreme ends of the spectrum. High highs and low lows.
There will be days when you want to throw in the towel. Days when you HATE your van with a burning passion. Days when you would kill for a hot bath in the comfort of an actual house.
But you know what else we all hate sometimes? Ourselves. Our jobs. Our partners. Our parents. We feel negatively toward EVERYTHING IN OUR LIVES at some point or another. Vanlife is no exception.
We vanlifers cling to this notion that it has to be awesome mostly because it took so much damn hard work to make it a reality. We personally struggle with a lot of guilt on days when we don’t enjoy it as much as we feel like we should. After all, we worked so hard to get here, so is there something wrong with us when it doesn’t seem fun? No there isn’t. It’s 100% okay to hate it sometimes. You don’t get an F because you fantasize about your old apartment, just like those cheeky underwear chicks don’t get an A+ for sharing a limited view of van life (Guess what? They hate it from time to time, too).
You aren’t doing it wrong if you find yourself miserable from time to time. Of course, if you find yourself miserable ALL the time, it might be time to reconsider the lifestyle, which is also okay! Vanlife is largely an experiment and unless you’ve done it before, there’s just no way to know how you’re going to like it. If you fail at it, oh well! You learned something and you got one hell of a life experience out of it.
You cannot fail at vanlife. Now read that sentence again.
13. You are no less badass for struggling.
Those feelings of self doubt are only compounded by the sometimes strange nature of the vanlife community. The climbing vanlife community especially has the tendency to cultivate an unspoken contest over who’s the dirtiest dirtbag.
Oh you live in a high roof 2018 cargo van? Yeah, I’ve been living out of the back of my Subaru for four years. Oh you haven’t showered in a week? I don’t even own a bar of soap anymore. Okay, that last one’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. Dirtbagging is full of, “That’s cute and all, but talk to me when you’re as hardcore as I am.”
We don’t say this to talk poorly of the community. We love our fellow dirtbags, but have felt more connected to people we’ve met for brief interludes than those we did in places we lived for years. Most the time, van lifers don’t do it intentionally. Everyone just wants to feel special for whatever unique way in which they live on the road, even if it comes at the expensive of making someone else feel bad for how they do it.
Over the months, we’ve learn how to not compare ourselves to others (or let others compare themselves to us). We’ve come to terms with the fact that we LIKE showering and doing laundry every once in a while. We openly admit to struggling and disliking the lifestyles at times.
Transparency is something we value above our dirtbag image. We pursue it here on this website and on our social media channels. Let’s break down the notion that van life is awesome all the time so people can stop feeling bad when it isn’t. Sorry not sorry if that makes us a little less badass.
Bonus: It’s worth it
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about all the negative aspects of vanlife you just don’t see when scrolling through the exotic images under #Vanlife. Based on all that you might thinking, “Wow, vanlife actually seems kind of terrible. Maybe I don’t want to do it afterall.”
Toss those thoughts out the window because even though it can be really rough at times, the one thing Instagram photos capture (literally) really well is that it is amazing. Even if the bad days outweigh the good some months, the good ones are so incredible that it’s 100% worth it.
So go ahead and pursue your van dreams! We haven’t told you these bad things to talk you out of it, but rather to tell you that even with the hard stuff it’s worth the price of admission. That’s something we so wished someone had told us, BEFORE dealing with months of crippling self doubt and wondering if we just weren’t cut out for it. Now that we know these things are totally normal, we can more fully enjoy the highs and lows van life has to offer. We hope we’ve saved you some of that tough learning curve.
So raise a glass or can (or two) to you and all your vanlife struggles. Because the struggle, in a weird way, makes it even more worth it.