Van Life Challenges, An Honest Reflection
Imagine being on a road trip. Indefinitely.
Are you building a camper van? Check out this illustrated guide I made, with love!
Disclaimer: I’m building a company, contracting for another, and trying to make the most of van life. Life is busy! Your circumstances might be wildly different.
The joys of vanlife far outweigh the challenges that follow. I‘m grateful for the van I’ve built and the chapter I’ve been so lucky to experience. At the time of writing this, however, I’ve abandoned my van in the PNW where it is currently 115°F (130°F inside the van) and uninhabitable.
⏱ TL;DR (Too Long; Don’t Read)
- Too many little inconveniences to count. You can lose up to an hour or two every day for planning, research, driving, parking, reparking, looking for places to empty your toilet, empty your gray water, and more.
- Your health + wellness can take a major hit.
- Working from your van isn’t realistic. Even with a cell tower booster.
- All those beautiful Instagram campsites? If you’re East of Colorado you’re shit outta luck. West of there, you’ll still spend plenty of time hunting.
- Embracing change is important… but change is exhausting. Van life means change is a part of daily life. Humans need a degree of routine and stability. Especially for focus.
If you’re truly bumming around, van life might be perfect for you. And I’m envious! If you’re working as much as I am, consider the following.
🥇 All the little inconveniences. They add up.
How do you currently feel about the little inconveniences in your life? The mundane little chores and headaches throughout the day. Take that and multiply it tenfold.
A one-week road trip is already mentally exhausting for most but it’s a beautiful experience, and that’s why we do it. But think about all those moments of friction, now as a part of your day-to-day. The biggest variables are as follows.
🏋️♀️ Health and wellness
Eating healthy and going to the gym are two disciplines that keep me grounded as a human. This cascades into every other aspect of my life, from my ability to focus (I have terrible ADHD), to my mood, and the quality of my sleep. Even with intense weekends climbing Mt.Rainier, van life has taken a toll on my health.
💧 Staying hydrated
I’m ashamed at how often I’ll choose not to drink water. Running out of water is one variable. But more inconvenient is the fact that I’m always afraid of my van toilet getting full. I end up hilariously hesitant because of the logistics of a toilet.
Looking for public bathrooms or porta-pottys to awkwardly dump my black water in is a constant burden. It never gets any easier.
🛋 Comfort
It’s one thing to live in a tiny shoebox in NYC. It’s another to cram your living room, office, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom into 50 square feet.
I’ve come to realize that as a full-grown adult, you need a certain amount of space for your mental and physical wellbeing. To stretch out, breathe, and simply wiggle your arms and legs.
Now that it’s summer, it’s also hot. It’s pretty much the same as sitting in your stuffy car on a hot day. Now that Covid is letting up, I spend every possible minute of the day hanging out in coffee shops. Being able to stretch my legs, walk around, and most importantly, use the bathroom, is such a luxury.
🥘 Cooking in a van sucks
My fridge is tiny. My freezer, even tinier. A two-burner stove with 2 square feet of counter space? Hilarious. My pan doesn’t fit on the burner, or in the sink. Washing dishes by hand as sink water splashes all over your living space? Pure joy.
I’m already not a fan of cooking and with the amount of friction above, I often find myself skipping meals altogether. If I’m not cooking, or skipping meals, I’m eating out. And I don’t have to tell you that eating out for months is unfulfilling and unsustainable. I’m down 25lbs and getting skinny fat.
I also have constant fresh water anxiety because 30 gallons disappear faster than you think. Just thinking about the water wasted from washing dishes is enough friction to forego cooking breakfast.
🏋 The physical toll is real
I’m hoping you’ll make time for hikes, snowboarding, climbing, and all the great adventures vanlife affords. This truly will balance out a lot of the sedentary aspects. Just remember to stretch! I doubt you’ll have space in your van for 30 minutes of yoga, and if you can get into downward dogs in the dead of winter, I applaud you.
If you’re someone who relies on gyms for discipline and routine, this probably won’t be the healthiest chapter of your life. Any opportunity I can sneak in a lift or some yoga, I take. But even with an Anytime Fitness membership, on the road, gyms are few and far in between.
👨💻 WFV (working from van)?
How does no one provide unlimited hotspot data?
Until a cell provider has truly unlimited high-speed hotspot data, it’s going to be challenging.
Even though I have a maxed-out plan with a phone, Jetpack, and 60gigs of hotspot data, it’s still a constant mental burden. I take all my zoom meetings from my phone, which makes screen sharing awkward and impossible. I literally feel 20X more productive sitting here in this Airbnb, knowing I have unlimited internet access. Something I never thought I’d have to take for granted.
Now that coffee shops are re-opening, this might solve many of my productivity and connectivity woes. But even then, that can be unreliable.
Working from nature?
So your Weboost antenna gets you 1 or even 2 bars of connectivity in the middle of nowhere? At first, I was stoked. Then I realized it was infuriatingly reminiscent of the dial-up days. The romantic idea of whipping out your laptop with 5-star views can be fairly hard to attain. Even if you do your research and pull up Verizon’s coverage map, I guarantee you’ll have to finagle yourself around to catch those 5Gs in the breeze.
If you don’t have important zoom meetings and the need for internet, you, my friend, are one lucky human. Get out there and disconnect. Please soak up all that nature, on my behalf.
🚌 Parking can drive you insane (pun intended)
🌃 Parking in cities is an obvious challenge
Every two hours I scramble back to the van and find a new spot. Someone already smashed off my left mirror. I’m constantly worried about parking tickets. The thought of someone breaking in gives me van separation anxiety. It’s one thing to have your car broken into but this is your home. Take my laptop but please not my adventure gear!
Sometimes the hunt for parking takes five minutes. Other times, you’ll circle for twenty. Do that four times a day and that’s a substantial amount of time. I can also parallel park anything now but the van ain't no smart car.
Most days I give up and find a skate park on the outskirts of town to bunker down at for the day. No time limits and not a bad option.
🍁 Parking in nature can also suck
Finding an enchanting campground can be harder than you think. I spent two days on the Oregon coast before giving in to exhaustion and driving inland. Sleeping in your car is illegal in all the coastal towns here.
The other night I awoke in sheer panic to a cop banging on the side of my van, flashlights peering through a sliver of exposed glass. She issued a warning and told me I had to leave town. Driving down Highway 101 at 1 am, desperately looking for any place to pull over and sleep, is not a recipe for comfort by any means.
Most of the incredible spots in nature are also very off the grid. We’ll cover this next, but if you need connectivity you’ll be extremely constrained.
It goes without saying that you’ll find many gems along the way. That’s the allure of van life anyways, right? Sleeping at the base of Mt.Rainier every weekend for a month was possibly one of the greatest luxuries I’ll ever experience in life. But the stress of finding spots along the way is exhausting. But you’ve really got to hunt for those spots. Sure there’s iOverlander and freecampsites.net …. but if all those gems were public they’d be overrun. (If you’ve got any beta please share!)
🌙 Parking at Night
If you’ve found a glorious BLM, forest road, or hidden gem of a spot in nature, you’re golden.
If you’re stealth camping in a city, the mental friction takes its toll. Every night I move, there’s the uncertainty of awaiting a knock in the middle of the night. Oftentimes it's noisy and your sleep will be restless. You’ll get used to it all, to some degree, but it can really take its toll.
I found a rhythm in Seattle and a perfect go-to parking spot. Then, I didn’t leave for 6 weeks. There’s something oddly comforting about having a reliable, physical space, even if it's just a parking spot you return to every day.
🛁 Hygiene. But you already knew that.
You’ll get used to showering once a week. It’s better for you anyway. But if there are cute girls (or guys) along the way, you might hesitate to say hello because hey, you’re living the dirtbag life!
Having a van toilet is a blessing and a burden. A godsend for desperate situations but I still hesitate to use it, as addressed previously.
I try not to poop in the van. As a matter of fact, I’ve only done it once in all three months. In such a small space, you don’t want your bedroom, kitchen, and living room, smelling like a bathroom. And if there are multiple humans in your van, that makes matters more interesting. Looking for places to poop every day, and planning around that, can be exhausting. I never thought I’d take a regular toilet for granted.
🌞 A balanced life is a healthy life.
There are obviously solutions to much of the above and your plans or lifestyle might be wildly different from mine. The nature of your work (or lack thereof), freedom from connectivity, and location, all play a major role in how realistic van life will be for you.
Once again, the positives of vanlife are wildly positive and of abundance. Freedom, unparalleled access to nature, the financial benefits of living rent-free, endless novelty, the comforts of a home anywhere you choose to park it, having a fridge stocked with LaCroix wherever you go, and most of all, the opportunity to live in towns and among people/cultures you otherwise never might in life. This last point is deserving of its own article.
What’s next? I’m hunting for a permanent home, somewhere that’ll feed my soul. I’ll either keep the van or swap it for a Westy for part-time vanlife. Two to three-week-long adventures will be far more suitable for my lifestyle.
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