SLOW SALLY & CREW

What comes to your mind when you picture vanlife? Is it an endless vacation? The freedom of the open road? Stellar views out the back door? Never-ending adventure?

If any or all these things come to mind, you’ve been sucked-into social media’s portrayal of vanlife. A quick internet search reveals plenty of blog and vlog posts dispelling the myth of vanlife as an aesthetic fantasy, but these perspectives get drowned out by the much more plentiful posts, on Instagram in particular, displaying a constant highlight reel of #vanlife as sunsets, bikini bodies, and curated custom van interiors.

Don’t get me wrong, vanlife can (at times) be adventure-filled, exciting, and beautiful, but that’s not the whole picture. There’s another side to vanlife, that I like to describe as “the mundane, the bad, and the ugly”. When this side of vanlife comes up in conversation with our family and friends, they’re often surprised. In other words, despite our efforts to be as genuine as possible in our posts, we haven’t managed to accurately depict all aspects of vanlife and long-term van travel. It’s somewhat inevitable I suppose, as the most fun and exciting content to share is the beautiful landscapes and epic travel stories.

For those of you itching to learn about real vanlife, this post is for you.

The Mundane

The mundane side of vanlife permeates just about every day that we are on the road. It’s not unpleasant, it’s simply boring. No adventures to be had here!

Doing vanlife chores. If you’re on the road for more than a week or two, you will find yourself spending a lot of time doing chores. Yup, just like back home! We devote more time than I’d like to admit searching for and gathering the resources we need for basic living: filling the water tanks, emptying the composting toilet and grey water, buying groceries, doing laundry, sourcing showers, and finding campsites, just to name a few. Because our environment is constantly changing, researching how and where to do these daily chores is an ongoing task that multiplies the normal effort associated with them.

Cleaning and transforming the van. Attempting to maintain a cleanish van is another endless task. A van’s interior living space is tiny and goes from squeaky clean to filthy in an instant. This filth is multiplied if you have a fluffy adventure mutt on board. Throughout the day, we find ourselves constantly de-furring fabrics, wiping surfaces, and putting stuff away. Despite all that effort, I would rarely describe our van as ‘clean’. Additionally, our small bed doubles as our lounge and eating area, so transforming this multi-use space is something we must do twice a day, every day.

Keeping up with personal admin. If you travel for long enough, or if you live full time in your van, personal admin will catch up with you. Given that nothing is certain but death and taxes, you better believe that tax season and all other annoying daily admin will be part of your vanlife experience. Just like at home, we spend a significant amount of time paying bills, doing taxes, responding to emails, etc. These tasks are often complicated by poor internet, uncomfortable working conditions (too hot, cold, wet, etc.), and the lure of more interesting activities.

The Bad

Sometimes vanlife is bad, unpleasant, and downright disagreeable.

Getting the knock. One of the least pleasant wild camping (aka boondocking) experiences is getting the knock. “The knock” refers to the experience of having a policeman, security guard, or other official knock on your van door to let you know that “you’re not welcome to camp here, and you must leave”. It’s awkward, hugely inconvenient, and if you make wild camping a habit, almost certain to happen to you at some point.

We’ve experienced the knock a few times over the years – the most recent being last year in Alabama. Several entries on the iOverlander app assured us that the Cooter’s Pond Park was a perfect place to spend the night. We arrived in the dark and proceeded to cook a hearty pot of pasta. As we took our first bites we heard the whoop-whoop of loud sirens just outside our window. Uh-oh. Marc scrambled out of the van to make sure that things didn’t escalate. The cops informed us that the park was closed for the night and that we weren’t allowed to stay. They were reasonable enough to let us finish our pasta before moving on, but it meant having to pack the van back up after a long travel day and meander through Prattville, Alabama in the dark to find an underwhelming “campsite” in a big box parking lot.

Suffering through bad weather. Bad weather is especially unpleasant when you are living or traveling in a van, because it is inescapable. The level of unpleasantness depends on your van and how well prepared you are. We have excellent down sleeping bags and have no trouble overnighting in temperatures well below freezing. However, Sally is as insulated as a tin can so when we’re not in our sleeping bags, her interior can feel absolutely frosty. We’ve spent many meals eating at the table wearing our toques, down jackets, and with our legs in our sleeping bags. In our opinion, the worst type of weather is cool, damp and rainy, which results in us being imprisoned within the confines of the van. Escaping into indoor spaces such as malls or restaurants isn’t an option for us because we travel with a needy adventure mutt.

Being dirty. Forget about taking a daily shower while living out of a van unless you spend a lot of time in fully serviced campgrounds. If you’re wild camping and/or on the move a lot, showers can be difficult to find. There are lots of solutions to showering on the road – gyms, truck stops, campgrounds, bucket and solar showers in nature – but these options aren’t always easy or feasible, so it means that we are often dirtier than we’d like to be. Gross but true.

The Ugly

While most of the issues we’ve presented so far fall into the categories of boring, inconvenient or annoying, some vanlife experiences are downright ugly.

Getting sick. Experiencing illness in the van is one of the most unpleasant “adventures” we’ve had to date. Marc and I have both suffered minor ailments while travelling in Sally but the most memorable (and awful) was when we both got really sick while visiting San Cristobal de Las Casas, in southern Mexico. Maybe it was salmonella, or perhaps it was our neighbour’s “van-bucha” brew. We’ll never know for sure but it was traumatic enough that we wrote a whole blog post about it.

Last year, Walter developed a terrible infection in his abdomen (read about it here) while we were travelling in northern Mexico. Thankfully the vet in El Paso, Texas was able to diagnose and treat him. However, after spending a couple of nights in the van with a recuperating Walter, who was still wearing his cone of shame and leaking fluids from his incisions, we decided to abandon Slow Sally and book ourselves into an Airbnb while he recovered. Lots of lessons learned.

Experiencing mechanical failure. When your van is out of commission, you lose both your home and your mode of transportation. It’s a helpless feeling and sometimes a very expensive situation. Our most stressful van travel experience to date happened when our transmission failed near Loreto, in Baja Mexico. We ended up spending a whole month and thousands of dollars getting Sally back on the road. You can read all about that here. Over the years and kilometres we’ve travelled with her, Slow Sally has only broken down 4 times. The other 3 breakdowns were simpler fixes, but still relatively stressful experiences.

Surviving rodent and insect infestations. If you think that pests in your house are gross, they are 100x grosser in a van. Sharing our tiny living space with Walter is challenging enough; sharing it with massive numbers of flies, mice, or other creatures is intolerable. Last year, unbeknownst to us, we picked up unwelcome mouse hitchhikers in the Franklin Mountains State Park, just before spending a few days in an Airbnb. When we returned to the van, the mice had pooped in every single drawer, eaten through our shelf liners, and helped themselves to many of our dried goods. As we went to sleep, we’d hear them skittering around in the kitchen. We had to set traps, which went off every night in the cupboard just beside the bed. Each snap of a trap left us feeling of both relieved and disgusted. It took days to finally get rid of all the mice.

Is Vanlife Worth It?

If you follow this blog, you know that we’ve had a lifetime’s worth of epic travel experiences in Slow Sally. For us, the mundane, the bad and the ugly experiences are a small price to pay. That said, van travel isn’t for the faint of heart. I recently read an article in the New York times in which the author lamented that #vanlife wasn’t the aesthetic fantasy she had imagined, and that was after just one short week of travel. If you’re thinking about living or traveling in a van, the less glamorous side of vanlife is something to consider.

Stay Tuned

We’ve been climbing and hiking in northern Mexico for over a month and we’re ready for a change of scenery. We’ll soon be heading to one of Mexico’s big colonial cities for some traditional cuisine, culture, and urban exploring. But first, we’re sharing a post listing and ranking our top 5 favourite Mexican cities. Stay tuned!