Five years ago, I put my life on hold and bought a minivan to live in. It was pre-covid and the early days of the vanlife movement – I figured hitting the road for a year on a cross-country trip would allow me to clear my head and process the death of my partner a year earlier.
Isn’t it funny how very traumatic events sometimes push us to do very unusual things? Well, maybe not always, but in my case it did.
It was a 2008 Toyota Sienna. Not a bad van, but it was getting up in milage and was in need of a little body work. I later found out that it was a fleet vehicle, it spent all of its time in Ottawa, Ontario, and was in worse shape than I thought. Ottawa gets a lot of snow and its winters are long – therefore, they use a lot of salt on the roads. Oh, and it had a family of 8 stick people on the rear window, so it got a lot of use, presumably.
That summer, after removing the carpet from the floor, I discovered just how bad it was. There were two 4 inch holes in the floor in the middle row where the kids would have placed their feet – that made sense. Also, many smaller holes appeared after I ground the rust away. Let’s just say the floor pans in the second row were no more.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I did the body work, installed a diesel heater, bed, counter, etc, and took off to the west coast of Canada in September of 2019.
Since I make my income online, I had the freedom to take a trip like this and pretty much stay on the road as long as I wanted. I realize few people are able to do this and I certainly count myself lucky in that regard.
After a year of watching YouTube videos and converting the van, I was finally on the road to freedom. It looked so glamorous on YouTube and I was pumped to finally start my trip. Who knows what adventures lie ahead? Who knows who I might meet in my travels? I kept telling myself that this just felt right. At a minimum, I’d have some great stories to tell later on.
The novelty very quickly wore off as I was forced to adjust my life to the confines of the van. The first night quickly brought everything into focus. I parked at a Walmart because that was the thing to do for vanlifers, but it wasn’t smooth sailing. While I wasn’t bothered by anyone, I struggled with my new routine. Just brushing my teeth that night proved to be a struggle.
I needed more organization, I told myself. Starting out, I assumed I knew the best location for water, my night bag, etc, but once I was doing it, I had to completely change everything.
Laying down on my new bed that first night, I had a hard time getting to sleep. I couldn’t relax because it felt abnormal to be sleeping in a vehicle in a parking lot. It felt unsafe, yet there was nothing outside that appeared threatening. I kept saying to myself, “What are you doing?”
4 days, 2 more Walmart nights, 1 truck stop night, 2 expensive truck stop showers later, I arrived in Vancouver, Canada after a nightmare drive on the Coquihalla highway (an extreme highway/mountain pass in the clouds with an outrageous speed limit of 120km/hr!). I was used to driving in big cities, but I struggled and felt stressed out. Sleeping here seemed like a bad idea and the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that I was homeless for the first time in my life. Call it what you will, vanlife, rv’ing, whatever – the bottom line is that I was homeless in a large city, 4000 km from home with nothing to fall back on but my beat up, used van.
I didn’t stick around and headed towards Whistler and a town called Squamish. From what I had heard, there were many other vanlifers in this town. My plan was to do some camping and maybe a few Walmart nights before heading back to the coast and getting on a ferry to Vancouver Island. Of all the places in Canada, Vancouver Island is the most temperate in the winter and the area least likely to see snow.
Squamish turned out to be one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. It was also at this time that the van broke down and needed $1500 in repairs. I had to wait 1 week to get it into a shop. While I waited, I ended up staying at the town’s Walmart at night and hiking during the day. The van was still drivable, but not for any long distances. Driving into the back country at this point was too risky.
It was mid October by the time the van had been repaired and I had to make a decision to either go west to the island or head back home. I had just blown through most of my emergency break-down funds, winter was coming and I didn’t have snow tires to make it through the mountain passes. I had a very narrow window to escape and I took it. 5 days later, I was back home in Ontario.
Why did I head back? Well, many reasons, but the main one was that I was sick of feeling homeless. I realized that I needed more than what vanlife could provide. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great experience, but it just wasn’t for me. I enjoy having a home with hot and cold running water, a stove, a shower, a washer/dryer, etc.
Looking back, I just couldn’t get used to the drastic change in lifestyle. Everything was a struggle, from brushing my teeth, to finding washrooms, finding laundromats, to finding showers. Also, I literally could not move in that van to do my usual routine. Even changing my clothes was a struggle. And don’t even get me started on cooking. I basically ate at McDonald’s for the month because setting up the stove, cooking, then trying to wash the dishes would have been awful.
In hindsight, I would not have attempted this trip in the minivan, had I known – it was just too small. I had no room to do anything but sleep and drive, everything was packed away in a space where it was always a struggle to access. It felt like I was homeless, living in a car (maybe just slightly better).
An actual full-sized van without windows would have been a drastic improvement I think – even with worse gas mileage. It would have had more stealth without having to worry about covering all the minivan windows at night and taking them down in the morning. That whole deal looked pretty sketchy to be honest.
Some people actually thrive, living in minivans. I don’t know how – maybe they have better, more minimalistic setups that allow them to function better. Maybe they’re younger (there’s a good chance they are). Or maybe they just have a different way of looking at life. I don’t really know, but when you know something isn’t for you, you know.
Anyway, I’ll probably have more to say about vanlife in future posts.
