I'm Emily. I'm Corey. And this is our van, Basha.
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We've been on the road for five years.We were in Nicaragua on a surf trip and
we actually ran into Foster Huntington. He just kind of mentioned at one
point, "you guys should check out this van life thing. You guys would probably
enjoy it." At that point Emily was a website developer. We had that ability to
take work on the road. We were really inspired by the simplicity of the
lifestyle down there. Going with the flow and being immersed in nature, being more
disconnected from technology. It began as like an experiment really. Can
we work nine to five and merge that with this like nomadic, adventurous lifestyle
that we envisioned? We soon learned that it was definitely possible.
We kind of look at work in two forms. You can be a Digital Nomad where you're
working constantly, always checking in. Or you get to compartmentalize
your work and your travel, where you get to work for a bit of time and then
slowly focus on travel. Yeah and I think that was one of our largest challenges
in the first like three years. We had to be connected all the time. As a web
manager, anything can happen so you gotta like be there for your client. At this
point I like being able to compartmentalize I think. It's a balance,
to work really hard and then be able to go.
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This is our 1987 VW Vanagon named Basha.
It's a Westfalia, full camper, pop-top, full kitchen inside and it sleeps four people
comfortably. Basha is a fairly modified two wheel drive Vanagon. We have been
working with GoWesty; we upgraded our engine, which was a huge thing. When we
did that we redid the cooling system, the exhaust is stainless steel now, upgraded
cooling pipes. We have bigger wheels and tires.
Fox suspension up on front. It's a two inch receiver hitch, but allows us to
carry our hi-lift jack up here and hopefully some sort of small dirt bike
in the near future. To give us a little shelter from sun and rain we have an ARB
awning, bolts right on to the van. They make like rooms for these and screen
rooms too so you can really like outfit yourself for some serious glamping. The
pop top is just like one of the key things that makes the Westfalia so
noticeable and so amazing. Gives you essentially an 8-foot ceiling for the
cooking area. We've added a couple strut systems that allows us to carry a
full roof box. I can push it up and down super easy by myself. David Harrison,
Vanagon Life, makes these these vents and this allows us this is actually
auxiliary out to be wired up so we can plug in different devices to get power
out of our battery, and on the other side the same vent lets us charge our
battery with our solar panel. We have a 50 foot cord attached to this 100 watt
flexible solar panels. One that GoWesty sells. The bumper setup
that we have is made by GoWesty. This was a pretty big game-changer for us. So this
allows us to carry three bikes. I can put a third one over here. I also have my
bike work stand there. On this side we have our drinking water so we have four
gallons outside, four gallons inside. Spare wheel, beside the wheel there we
actually carry snow chains. To have a vehicle with this small of a footprint
though you can put this much stuff on and still has like off-road capability which
these things do. I mean the clearance is super high you know having Fox
suspension and bigger wheels and all-terrain tires, they're pretty
unstoppable. This is another Vanagon Life product. It replaces the glass window and
allows you to carry tools. You can also put like max tracks and you could also
put your hi-lift jack on this. I choose to have a shovel and an ax for the moment. Emily
found out it's the perfect spot for a hula hoop so my man zone kind of got taken over here.
It's all good though. This is actually a shower that runs off our propane tank
and off our 12-volt auxiliary battery. This whole like shower unit fits in this
little box, which is pretty sweet. We bought the van like pretty much
everything has like been touched or gone over. This is like the last relic from
the previous owner, it's a PA system and plays like
animal sounds and sirens.
*Cows Mooing*
So that's kind of creepy, for sure.
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Welcome to the inside of my home, Basha.
This is the downstairs bed and let me show you what it does. Fold it up like this
and then pop the couch up and have a seat in the living room. I can swivel
the table out. So this becomes the office. It's a really beautiful table
that was made by a friend at San Diego Urban Timber. When trees are taken down
by the city or they fall due to a storm, they come in and they take it and they
divert the trees from the landfill and they make functional art with it. We eat
here. We eat dinner, we eat breakfast and lunch and work so love love love just truly
love this table. I really really love this table. This is
a Bose speaker and we have been using our...basically, this van is really old and everything is kind of broken
and so we've only had one speaker and the speakers been on the
right door and it like does weird things, and often doesn't work at all, and so we
finally splurged a couple months ago and bought a post speaker and it's actually
really amazing. So there's two doors. This is my door and this is Corey's door.
So when you hook the fruit basket we wrap it around this post here and we hook into that loop.
Underneath of the couch we have more storage space. We have our battery
to help jump the car and it also has a compressor on it too.
Let's go this way.
So we have a closet in here, but we don't actually access it through this
door, we had an upgrade and got this door here which is like a total game
changer because we can actually get into our closet. This is our closet, welcome to my
closet and Corey's closet. We have the heater. This is our Propex heater dial.
You turn it on, turn it to the right, and we have heat. We didn't have heat for the first
three or four years on the road. We've got these lights.
These lights are really great because they like, well first of all, they're really great
because they're blue. They're very portable so they can snap on anywhere.
Let's cruise around a bit of the van.
Hmm here. This is the kitchen. This is a cutting board right here. My dad
actually made this for us and when we travel and we drive, we store it behind the seat.
And we swivel the arm around.
It really helps to have this, like ergonomically right, this is a little bit
this is okay, but it's better for us to sit here. Comfortable seat, really great for cooking, we can talk, we can cook.
We have a two burner propane stove. We have an electric sink, we actually don't have water in
the tank right now so nothing is coming out. When we wash dishes, we dry them here. When we drive, we just
lower the lid. Here, let's go underneath of this thing actually. This is our blender. It's a
smoothie wand. It takes up very minimal space and it's very easy to use.
You simply plug in...ta-daaaa. We have a smoothie. Close the door. Oh food, food pantry.
Here we go. This is the food pantry. We go grocery shopping when we're traveling and not on the farm and
eating food from the garden. We're filling this about once a week. We do like a big grocery shop and get
produce and stuff it full and Corey is very, very good at packing.
Okay, let's go up top. Well, there's nowhere to really go, but this, this up here
is the top. It's the loft, it's our second story and right now it's storage space
because we're living the farm life, but we often sleep up here especially when
it's really hot at night. We sleep up here because there's more ventilation.
These windows zip down
and really open up the airflow in here. There's one on the front and one on the
side too. And, how do we actually make it into a
bed? We, well we clear all this stuff off, and we put it into the back over here
and then we flip it down so it folds down and becomes about maybe eight feet
long and then we hoist ourselves up. So we like come over here, step on the refrigerator.
In the summer we sleep more upstairs and the rest of the year down. Or if Corey and I really need some space
from each other, one can be down, and one can be up. That's a possibility too.
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Anything is possible when you put your mind to it, and nothing is guaranteed. I would say like not waiting
around, like taking charge of what you want to do in your life. We are creating this lifestyle
for ourselves. We're creating our worth. And you really just got to be proactive
and get out there and make it happen if you want to live this lifestyle because
there's really no template. There's no Rule Book. You can have a lot of freedom
and a lot of fun, but it definitely takes, also takes, like preparedness and hard
work. Go for it. Just do it. Stop thinking about it. You're always gonna have doubts
that pop into your mind and that's being human. So just keep moving and
hold your vision and step forward.
And it's interesting to see we were born in this time where it was like a
really materialistic mindset and we're kind of going back the opposite way and
I don't know if that's just because what we saw when we were growing up. I think
that happiness definitely wasn't found through those means and that
happiness has nothing to do with, with material things.