We’ve got major wanderlust and have always dreamed of renovating a van! Santa Cruz is a vanlifer’s dream. Both having lived there, we’ve always seen vanlifers coming and going and loved the thought of setting out to see all of the beautiful spots in our country without all of the stress of vacation and air travel.

Our van is Boatie, a 1987 Ford TransVan. Mariah’s cousin did vanlife in Santa Cruz for a bit before deciding to move to New Zealand. He asked us if we’d be interested in buying his van. At that point we had been window shopping for a while, so we decided to take the leap!

Boatie’s interior is fairly original. Her original owner hardly ever used her, so everything held up really well. We decided to just do some updating rather than a full tear-down and rebuild.

Boatie is a pre-built RV on a van chassis. We’ve left the entire layout the way she came. Initially, we had grand plans of gutting her and starting over, but we lived in an apartment in Oakland, CA with no parking. 2 months after we purchased her, the pandemic hit. We had no way to get significant work done, so instead, we painted some of the interior and called her ready! In the blink of an eye, we packed up our apartment, and Boatie became our home. Almost a year later, we’ve moved back out of the van and have slowly started taking on little projects now that Boatie has her own parking spot and we have space to keep tools!

Just the US. We’ve put international travels on hold due to COVID, but hope to hit Canada and Mexico someday soon!

We lived in Boatie full-time with our cat and dog for 7 months before deciding to call it quits. We were primarily traveling the PNW when the devastating fires hit here (Portland) and in CA. Since going home was no longer an option with fires raging between CA and OR, we made a decision for our own health and our pets’ health to take a break from vanlife and find housing.

I think it really depends what you’re looking for! For us, we needed reliable internet for work 6 days a week, so that often meant staying at campgrounds or stealth camping in cities and neighborhoods. If it was up to us, we would choose camping in the middle of nowhere (ideally by water) with some friends. There can be something eerie about parking in the middle of the woods completely by yourself, but it’s so much fun if you’re with a group of people! We love meeting other vanlifers when we travel. 

Boatie is our rock! Having been our daily driver for nearly a year, she’s never broken down on us. We did recently get a 2nd car and started driving her less. So, that mixed with her being parked out in the snow, her battery did die on us, but that’s the only problem we’ve ever had with her. We’ve had to take her in for maintenance several times but never unexpected problems!

Before we lived in a van we both commuted into the city for work. It would take about 45 minutes each way, and in the winter, it would be dark by the time we got home. We were missing hours of our day just traveling home from work, but living in a van, at 5 pm, we closed up our computers and hopped into the hotspring we parked next to, or went on a hike or put up our hammock in a tree and read. We’re both big international travelers but with COVID, we had to get creative. We’ve been all over the world, but we realized there’s so much of our own country we haven’t explored. Traveling in a van made that so much easier. There’s so many hidden gems out there, and in a van, you can pull up right next to a lot of them and stay the night! It’s pretty incredible.

There certainly are downsides! Vanlife is not all instagram makes it out to be. The reality is that not all vanlifers are content creators. We didn’t have the luxury to drive from National Park to National Park, taking amazing photos and cooking delicious food. We were still working our demanding 9-5 jobs which meant we could only drive in the morning before work or in the evenings after work, and we had to have good wifi signals wherever we were staying. That made our options super limited and the traveling pretty stressful!
For us, vanlife was a dream but it was also a necessary reality. We had to move out of our apartment and into the van full time pretty quickly and unexpectedly. Because of this, we were working on the van and making it functional, while living in it. That made things pretty difficult. When we moved in, there was no working bathroom, no electricity and no running water. We still lived in the van for weeks before we were able to get those things fixed. Despite the challenges of vanlife, it forced us to really think about what we needed in our lives, rather than just wanted, and relearn what was important to us.