One Month In
Reflections and Learnings on My First Month of VanLife
“Are you going to Mount Washington?” my mom asked me a few days ago. I was in Massachusetts and had been in Vermont, and she knew I have a plan to go to Maine. So it was a reasonable question. But the reality is that I’d not thought about Mount Washington once. It wasn’t on my list or even my radar. I mean, I’d heard of it, but that was about it. So I looked it up. It turns out it is the highest peak in the Northeast and is alleged to have the worst weather in the world. And a cog railway has been hauling people up its ridiculous grade since 1869.
And then I sat there in the driver’s seat and realized: I could go. Not “someday.” Not “if I plan it for next summer.” I was a few hours away and there was nowhere I had to be.
So I went.
And now I’m writing this from a dispersed camping site on a forest road in the White Mountains, where I will be for two more nights. I think. There’s a fire ring about six feet from me that I’ve not used and will not use, because, it turns out, while I love the outdoors, I am not a huge fan of campfires. Especially dealing with my own. Go figure.
So much learning! And, not coincidentally, today marks one month of living in/out of Mystique, my trusty Toyota Sienna minivan cum home on wheels. And we’ve already been in a lot of different overnight situations together: driveways, forest roads, a parking lot or two, a campground with actual pit toilets and running (but not potable) water that felt like a resort. Oh, and one night in the middle of Pittsburgh. One whole month of living my life out of a minivan.
A lot of you have told me that you’re living vicariously through this audacious plan of mine. That it’s your dream. I love that, and I’m not going to puncture that bubble because it is pretty great. And, I want to tell you six big things I’ve actually learned in this month, because almost none of it is what I expected to learn, and very little of it is actually about the van.
1) Time got weird immediately
I’ve always kept track of my hours for ministry in units, where a unit is a 4-hour-ish block of time. We do this because it is hard to track ministry in hours because it has few natural boundaries, making it easy for ministers to overwork. Units allow us to manage our time and energy more effectively.
My days now come in different types of blocks of time, which really is not that dissimilar to a unit: There is a working block, which might be church or the book or this substack. There is a travel block which is usually driving and figuring out where to spend the night. There is an exploring block, which is hiking or skating or driving somewhere just to see it. And there is a chores block: groceries, showers, laundry, meal prep.
I get two good blocks a day. Two. That is it. The rest of the time is the general maintenance that happens whether I schedule it or not, which is mostly dishes and cleaning. So much cleaning. If I’m not careful, the general maintenance quickly will balloon into a whole chores block and there goes my afternoon.
Sometimes I pack in three exploring blocks in two days and then I’m behind on work and desperate to schedule a catch-up day (like today!). Sometimes I have traveled and worked and so the next day I try to make sure to do some exploring.
Two blocks. That’s the budget. Basically everything I do, I am spending one of my two blocks.
Connected to this, I measure time differently. An hour doesn’t mean much to me. Instead, I measure time in things like how much internet I actually need in a day, since my satellite dish is a power hog and Skynet (I mean Starlink, I mean Skynet) eats the battery like a starving dragon. Or I measure time in how many days I can stay in one place before the rules or the water or my own restlessness moves me along. Or if google tells me a drive is 3 hours I better think of it as being 4 so what time does that place me arriving at my next destination?
With this new way of measuring time, I’ve completely lost track of what day it is. Where was I last Monday? I have no idea. I’d have to check my journal and get back to you. I’ve started setting alarms with the whole instruction in the label, like my Tuesday 7:45am alarm which reminds me: Get ready for phone call with Mamie, because otherwise Tuesday is just any other morning and I’m likely to completely space on something that I committed to and that matters to me.
Maybe it isn’t time that has gotten weird, but my relationship to it definitely has shifted.
2) The type of structure I need
The fantasy is that you leave and … you’re free. No schedule, no container, no one’s clock but your own. And there is something to that. I’ve given up planning more than a day in advance almost entirely. I make Plans, capital P, with friends and family and work, and I keep those. But I figure out my day to day on the way. I had to reserve a specific time slot on the Cog Railway up to Mount Washington and I hated it. I sat there scrolling through time windows thinking, ugh, I have to be somewhere at 9:00am on a Thursday.
But it turns out that I didn’t escape the container. Instead, I found out how much container I actually need. I’ve always found the most freedom in structure, and so I seem to have devised a new structure. Like the blocks I mention above, and how it interacts with things that I need to do.
My calendar is still the thing everything else arranges itself around. If I have a 3:00 meeting on Wednesday, maybe the exploring block goes Wednesday morning and the travel block moves to Friday. I’ve decentered my work emotionally and yet it is still the fixed point, the thing the rest of the week bends around. What changed is not that the structure went away, it is that I am now the one who has to build it, every single day, out of whatever the weather and the battery and my energy and the forest road will allow.
And, this is a good thing! Because when I don’t have this structure, then the days don’t stack, they fuzz together. And it would be so easy for weeks, months, or years to go by like this without ministry and writing to hold me in the world. I can feel exactly how it would happen, and it would feel pretty wonderful the entire time. Except then I would only be savoring, and the saving part would disappear entirely. And that just won’t work for me. My structures ground me, but they have become more flexible, creative and fluid.
3) Learning also comes disguised as logistics
Every day, I need a plan for what to do with the contents of my Boxio. I need to know where the next potable water is. In an apartment, water arrives and waste leaves and I never once thought about either. Out here, both are decisions that I have to make every day. And the question is never really where do I dump this? The questions are: how much do I need, how far ahead do I have to think about it, and what happens to me, in my body and in my brain, when I don’t know yet?
This last one turns out to be the largest internal shift I’ve made. My anxiety has completely relocated. I used to be anxious about a hundred little things. Now there is exactly one: not knowing where I’m sleeping that night. That’s it. That is the entire remaining footprint of my anxiety, and it’s usually smaller than what I used to feel about trying to squeeze grocery shopping in between two meetings. I’ve learned to handle it by settling the question in the morning, so that even if it takes all day to find a place, I have all day.
I’ve also learned that I make mistakes a lot. I mean, of course I still do! But for example, I didn’t plan effectively to take Mystique into Newfoundland. Even if I had managed to look at the website in time to get tickets, the ferry from Bar Harbor had a seven-foot height limit and Mystique is 7’2”. Which I discovered after building the Newfoundland route around it. Of course. Another example: Half the rail trail I planned to skate in Bennington turned out to be dirt. I don’t actually need every size of mason jar. Did you know there are Costcos that don’t have gas stations?
A month in, the skill I have built most isn’t planning, it’s recovering. I’m getting genuinely good at being wrong and adjusting with minimal anxiety about it. This sure would have been a good skillset to develop a couple of decades ago!
4) I am, apparently, an outdoors person
I did not know this about myself! Or I didn’t remember it. As I was prepping for #vanlife, I genuinely didn’t know whether I’d mostly be doing urban stealth parking or actual camping. It turns out to be camping, in nature, most of the time. Which meant buying an outdoor table to type on and an awning to sit under, neither of which was in the original build.
When my fitness ring tells me I slept badly, it doesn’t matter much when I wake up next to a stream and with trees all around. And I’ve learned that I don’t have to get out of the van to see stars: I open the sunroof all the way and stand on the center console, barefoot, in my pajamas, with my head in the sky.
Since I am outdoors more, my screentime has decreased almost without my noticing. I still get anxious when I lose a signal, so this isn’t some purity thing. But I’m not scrolling TikTok at 11pm anymore, partly because I’m tired, and partly because everything out here just takes longer. It takes longer to eat. It takes an absurdly long time to get ready for bed, because I can’t put the dishes in a dishwasher and I can’t leave them overnight or they will attract creatures and also never actually get clean. It takes time to set up camp, to break camp, to prep Mystique for driving.
I’ve also fallen completely out of the news, and Beloveds, I like it. Truly enormous things still reach me: a notification, a friend, something surfacing on social media. But the daily churn is gone and I do not miss it and I have some complicated feelings about how much I don’t miss it, which maybe will be its own post. Who knows?
I’m still deathly afraid of ticks and I still despise mosquitoes and flies, but a digital nomad in West Virginia told me about ThermaCell (transformative, no notes). I’m also slowly replacing every pair of pants I own with hiking pants.
But what I really love about putting my office outdoors is that I get visitors. Honey bees, chipmunks, dragonflies. This morning, a hummingbird came and hovered in front of me for a few seconds, evaluating, and then left.
5) I keep waiting to be lonely
Something else I didn’t expect: I crave the solitude.
Not tolerate. Crave. I love the people I’ve seen this month, deeply, and after a day or two with any of them I’m ready to get back to my van and my blocks of time. I keep waiting to feel lonely and instead I feel like myself. I thought this craving of solitude would go away after a few weeks, but it seems to be getting more intense.
Thoreau would go to houses of his friends for dinner, and for me it is technology keeping me connected with friends and loved ones: phone calls, text messages, zoom calls. I’m blessed with an abundance of close connections that I can pull on anytime I want or need but the pull to go full hermit is strong.
So if it isn't loneliness, what is it? Because while I’m not lonely, I do notice that I want something out here, and it isn't more people. I don't have a name for it yet. Ask me in another month.
6) Balance is a moving target
In a month I will be in Kenosha, WI, in a building, on a schedule, working full time for four weeks straight. Meeting people, having meetings, strategizing, planning, caring, worshipping, supporting. All the ministry things I love.
And I’m looking forward to it. Truly. I want to be clear about that because it would be easy to write the residency part of this hybrid ministry I’m doing as the part where the freedom stops. But it isn’t. Instead, it’s a month of staying put. I’m going to wash every dish I own in a dishwasher. I’m going to launder every towel, every sheet, every piece of clothing, all of it, in machines, indoors. I’m not going to squeeze my blocks in around each other. I’m going to have regular life for a little while, and I’m going to be good at it, because I have been good at it.
And my guess is that somewhere in week three I will start counting the days until I break camp again.
That’s not a contradiction. That’s the arrangement. I chose this shape of ministry before I understood why I was choosing it, and a month on the road has made me confident it was right, because I now know what I need on both sides of it.
I used to think balance was a thing you find and stick to: Get the ratio right, lock it in, keep it there. It isn’t. It’s a moving target, and you don’t hit it once. You keep re-aiming, in the van and in the church and in whatever comes next.
Today, I am here. Friday, I break down camp and go skating (weather permitting) on what I hope is a paved route here in New Hampshire, ticking another state off my goal to skate indoors or out in all 50 states. Then to Maine for a weekend with a friend with a shower.
I have no plans on where I’ll be after that until the end of August.
Double plus to (3) and "recovery" or, as I think of it, just saying, life comes at you and the best skill is being adaptable. Good read, thanks!
Being newly retired after 40yrs in primary care medicine, I am also learning about balance, the change in "time"....