I'm Dylan. I'm Tess. And this is our 1975 Volkswagen Rita.
Well our first introduction to sort of van dwelling was I had an old pickup with a
camper shell just put a bed frame back there and would do weekend trips around
Alaska. From that spawned the idea to actually get a real van that had a stove and
everything in it for full time van living. After a summer of a lot of road trips
and living out of the truck we thought we wanted some more long-term travel. I
was teaching full-time and Dylan was working in an office job and we ran into
a buddy who told us about this Caravan trip down to Brazil for the World Cup in
2014. We were like, "that sounds pretty rad", so then that kind of morphed into, "let's
do a long term road trip" because we knew we liked that kind of travel together.
We decided on the vehicle first which is the Volkswagen Van, the classic bus. Once
we found one for five hundred bucks which was the only one for sale in
Alaska. We bought it, towed it back to our place in Anchorage, and just began
working on it and thought we'd be on the road in about two months. Took the
cabinets out, realized that the whole entire thing was rusted out, completely. We
could have Flintstoned our way to South America. So decided to weld new panels all around
re-paint the whole thing and then re-power it with a Subaru motor.
About a year later like ten months behind schedule we quit our jobs and then
kind of just hit the road in February of 2015.
This is Rita our 1975 Volkswagen bus Westfalia. She's in the Christmas spirit right now.
This is our refrigerator. It's a Engel compressor fridge. Behind it we kind of use that for
storage for some flat stuff like a grill for the fire and saw store our outdoor table here.
We have a big suburban propane furnace that blasts heat out of it right here so we have
to put like a metal plate against the fridge but this whole area just a ton of
heat comes out. Then we have a dual burner stove. Our cabinets are just two main
storage areas so we have like coffee and tea and pots and pans utensils and then
dry food storage. Five gallon water system with a little water pump up here.
All of our toiletries are down in here. Here we have the battery monitor for our
auxiliary battery. We have two 100 watt Renergy panels. The top panel comes on
a, we have it on a hinge like that, so we can face it towards the Evening Sun if
we need to. We just have a little foam barrier and then we have a second panel.
This one's on a thirty foot extension so we can park in the shade and then put this
in the Sun and when we were down in Central America it was definitely utilized.
We tried to park in the shade as much as we could and throw the panel in the Sun
and be set. Under here we have our safe where we can keep our two laptops or
cameras and all our lenses and this folds out into a bed as well so we have
two bed spaces. Upstairs and downstairs. So this is the upstairs, our little nest.
Yeah this is where we sleep most nights. It's like canvas material on the outside and
we have windows on either side just kind of gives us like a bird eye view of all
around and we're using like a three and a half inch memory foam. It's just on top
of plywood but it seems to be pretty comfortable. So since we have a Subaru
motor we adapted a tablet to connect to our engine so we can read all our
sensors from our engines so we know what's going on with the engine at all
times and to read any trouble codes or anything like that.
Bigger heater that runs off the Subaru motor too. These old Volkswagens didn't
actually come with the heater and we added some storage compartments
underneath full of our sunglasses and stuff that would normally just sit on your
dash and clutter it up. We have our propane tank attached underneath.
Originally it came inside the bus. This is a custom bumper and rack mount. We have a
bike attachment that comes off here if you wanted to have bikes and it just
swings out. Pretty nice to have this open because I use it as like a tool tray if
I'm working on the engine. There's the Subaru motor then up top we have a
locking surfboard rack that we can put kayaks or anything really up there. It's
just on these metal strands so it holds quite a bit so right now we have four
surfboards. In the storage box we have gosh, everything, yeah everything. It's like a Mary
Poppins bag it just keeps coming. We have a few wetsuits, tent, sleeping
bags, back packing backpacks. So it adds a little bit of weight to the pop top but
we added these assist shocks so these help push the top up. It still it takes two of us but
it's not nearly as hard.
I think we both just saw the trajectory kind of of our lives of like
"alright we're in it and we're in the grind and we'll be in this until we
retire more or less", and wanted to do some sort of long-term travel or
something to just kind of shake it up before we set back into that so I know
for me I'm looking forward to going back and teaching. I think for Dylan this will
definitely kind of change his direction career-wise when we go back. We feel
really fortunate that we decided to do this trip before we got too stuck in
you know with the mortgage and grown-up stuff like that because we've just met
such amazing people on the road and so many people that are living really
alternative lifestyles. When we head back our life will probably look a little bit
different than it would have before the trip. It's really, really changed how we
want to live. I think the advice I would give to people that want to do some van
dwelling or long-term travel is just to commit to do it. I think a lot of people
really stress out about all of the details and want so much lined up and
structured ahead of time and the first mile is the hardest. Once you get on the road
everything will, it will fall into place. Don't be afraid to like quit your job
and change your life. I think a lot of people are in that spot where they think
this lifestyle is so crazy and just out of reach and it's really not. It's not that
expensive. You can just transform your life completely and change your
perspective on on the world really if you'd like to just don't be afraid to
leave the rat-race. Van life isn't for everyone but I think our generation
there's a big move of people that are kinda saying screw it to the nine-to-five
like I want to make a life that works for me. A lot of people on the trip that
we've run into are like, "oh I'm so envious", "oh I wish I could do that" and
that's I think the thing that it's like we're two like totally normal people, you
can do it. Anyone can do it if you if you want to.
Do you want me to name them off?
Alaska, Canada, USA, Mexico, Belize
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru
Bolivia, Chile, Argentina. Nice.
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I'm in the desert by the way.