six months of van life, six months of mistakes on the road [an honest conversation]

okay let's do this hello everybody my name is mariah this is my van that i live in with my little pup named finn he's down on the ground eating something that he probably shouldn't be it's currently december 10th which means that i have officially lived in a van for six months and two days i left on june 8th 2020 and well i'm gonna talk about it in depth today today's video is gonna be a video about the last six months of my travels i'm just gonna break down as deeply as i can what my travels were like some of the lessons that i learned along the way some of the things that i had to go through where i went where i wish that i didn't go where i wish that i did go seasonal travel all the good stuff there's a lot to unpack here okay so a little bit of a mini backstory i bought this van in 2019 it's a ford transit medium roof 130 inch wheelbase and within a month of buying the van i was in a relationship with somebody named coleman who i am still in a relationship with today long story short we ended up doing the build together and we took off together on june 8th it was the two of us and our two dogs finn and his dog is cali oh my gosh i'm just thinking about all the things that i'm going to want to talk about in this video and uh it's gonna be overwhelming honestly this might be a long one so maybe grab a tea grab a coffee grab a water i don't know what you want to grab but maybe get cozy it might be a while so so june 8th we had kind of finished the van it wasn't all the way done but it was pretty much done it was mid-cover 19. we had both lost our jobs and we were kind of just like what the heck are we doing at home let's go so we left oh my gosh our first month was a mess i don't even know how to explain it our first night ever sleeping in the van our first free campsite in the van was this forest road in northern california so we're californians we had to take off from california we knew that we wanted to get out of california because i'd done some car camping and van camping in the past and i just i know that camping for free in california is not the easiest of things i didn't have all the resources that i now have at the time i was just using i want to say i overlander and free roam there's an app called free roam and for some reason i thought that it was the best app in the entire world i wasn't giving i overlander too much thought for some reason i still don't really understand that we ended up finding a forest road campsite in northern california near shasta county we slept there for the night and that night we i remember it like it was yesterday it's actually really interesting you don't forget your firsts we parked right off of a gravel road in a wooded area i didn't know how much the van could handle i didn't know who could handle in dirt roads i didn't know anything i had no idea off-roading i was not knowledgeable in the slightest um so i was nervous about the road coleman was nervous about how far out in the boonies we were with these trees i've now come to understand that there's certain areas that are super comfortable to sleep in aka it's pretty open not super wooded wooded areas can kind of feel creepy and this one i don't think it felt creepy but i do remember that night having a conversation about how we were really glad that we didn't have a soft shell pop-up or a soft shell camper we were really glad that this van is a steel box and then the next day we shot out of california and we went to oregon where we again i don't know where i was looking for campsites but our second night we ended up somewhere between the i-5 and the coast amongst all of these again really wooded areas where you can't see 10 feet in front of you where you would totally believe in sasquatch this was kind of our running theme in our first couple of months we didn't know that there was better campsites available so we were staying places that i now would never stay at let me just say that i'm really glad that i wasn't alone in the beginning because it was so creepy anyways second night we ended up in this place where what it was was blm land on a logging road so it was along a logging road but it was the kind of area where i had to say it nicely you would find needles which was a little bit creepy the rest of oregon kind of passed by in a blur we did a little time in abandon where we were city parking it's honestly like the last time that i ever city parked i don't like city parking i prefer staying somewhere where i know that i can legally sleep and honestly it's not that hard to find that kind of stuff if you know where to look and you're flexible enough with your areas so but eventually we did end up on this lake called sparks lake where it was the first forest road dispersed camping that we'd stayed at that was actual campsites it was really nice it was a really really nice area super super pretty and it was snowing and there was nobody around so we accidentally stumbled upon this gorgeous pristine spot there was the lake we had our own little private cove we had our own little private beach and our own jetta to watch the sunset we could see mount bachelor mount i don't remember what it was called but there was like a mountain in the background middle of oregon near bend it was very very very very very pretty and we ended up leaving after probably four or five days of being there at that point in our travels that was normal for us to stay either one day or two days and if we stayed more than that it felt like we were truly locals which is hilarious looking back on it because if i did sparks like now i would probably stay for two the whole 14 days and uh yeah and then we moved on way too quickly like i said before running theme in our travels we really really wanted to get to washington no i really wanted to get to washington because i thought that washington was where it was at but running theme we were only using i overlander and free roam at this time when we were in washington we were staying at places that could only really be described as sasquatch country and um we did have a couple nights where when the sun started to go down we started to hear these noises and we got all kinds of freaked out and coleman was like that's sasquatch and i was like what are you talking about like i've never heard i don't know i just i've never really been one to hear about sasquatch stories or anything like i was it wasn't even on my mind so when he said that sasquatch i was like i don't you're crazy you know and that was probably one of our most bizarre nights traveling together you have to understand these areas that we were in were not areas that i would have felt comfortable traveling by myself and they were not areas that i think a lot of people would have even now cole and i probably wouldn't stay in places like that it was beautiful but it was eerie as hell and the whole sasquatch thing threw a really big monkey wrench into all of it and we did end up because of all the weirdness booking it to montana specifically to coleman's grandparents barn in cameron montana we went there because we wanted better weather washington was really really overcast and we were sick of the trees our solar couldn't keep up because there was no sun because the trees were so tall and this entire time we'd only taken one shower and it was at hood river and it was this lukewarm shower that i think was meant for wind surfers but it was clutch nevertheless hood river was really beautiful too that was actually somewhere where i wish that we'd stayed a little bit longer but yeah cameron montana we went there to social distance at this point it was almost july about it it was exactly a month into our travels and covid was doing its thing you know and so we were kind of feeling the need to quarantine ourselves we were really hoping to be able to hang out with cole's grandparents that never happened because we ended up going to west yellowstone one day and it was so crowded that we felt like we needed a social distance all over again but yeah cameron was just our place to recuperate it was beautiful it's a beautiful area cole and i have considered what it would be like to live near there we really really like it there then the week of fourth of july rolled around it was a month and a half into our trip and coleman's family found themselves in utah and coleman and i happened to look at google maps and happen to find out that we were only eight hours from his family and so we went down and we surprised them in moab moab was really really pretty but you have to keep in mind that it was july and it was hot and we were right on a river and we were able to swim in the river it was actually pretty nice i'm not gonna lie to swim in the river but outside the degrees temperature it was a hundred and ten it was hot there was no denying it was miserably hot at night it was like 80 in the van even with the fan going and the window open it was hot that was also the trip where we tried to back in the van under some trees for some shade and we ran into a branch that was like this so um it was the first real bump on the van and it really stressed me out at the time i think a couple things came around in utah for us one i realized that the van is gonna get thrashed kind of sort of inevitably either way any vehicle that you take on the road full-time is gonna inevitably get thrashed it's gonna go on washboard roads it's gonna go on dirt roads it's gonna scrape it's gonna bump it's gonna get tree it's gonna get kind of thrashed that's the first area where we really wished that we had a beater and what i mean by that is like a vehicle that wasn't worth what this van is worth the other thing that we learned in utah was seasonal travel which is hilarious because this is the first time that we really experienced the need for seasonal travel aka going where the weather is the most comfortable but in reality it was only the beginning of mistake after mistake after mistake that i made that i'm gonna talk about coming up in regards to putting ourselves continuously back into these situations where we were extremely uncomfortable because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time of the year at this point it was the weather it was way too hot in utah we should not have been in utah in the middle of the summer i think that utah is best to do in the spring or in the fall i wish that i could do it in the winter but i don't have snow tires or a heater if i had snow tires or a heater i'd probably be in utah right now that's just the truth after utah we went into colorado no i had really high hopes for colorado uh my brother lives in colorado he goes to college there my grandma lives in colorado my dad had lived in colorado i have a lot of ties to colorado and so i think part of me was really hoping that i would fall in love with colorado i think part of me was really hoping that i could love colorado enough to want to move there or i don't know but colorado was another beast of its own things that happened in colorado one the weather was hot we ended up going up to a ski resort town i don't remember the name of it we did find one place called buena vista it was comfortable enough that's where we met a couple called faith and marshall they were from texas weekenders they're the first van life couple that we really met on the road first and really last honestly they were kind of the highlight of buena vista i think past that it wasn't anything necessarily special to us except for the fact that it was the first place where the weather was not horrendously hot there was no bugs which bugs was another big thing this entire summer we had just run into so many mosquito issues it was also the first place where the dogs could really run i know i haven't really talked about the dogs that much to this point but this one is a lot easier to take care of on the road cali is a lot more high maintenance she is an aussie like i just said she has a lot of energy and she also doesn't really do well when there's a lot going on around her she wants to know where everybody is at all times so she kind of gets really anxious and stressed out so it's kind of hard to have her around other dogs and stuff so buena vista was nice because we found a place that was borderline 4x4 but cole was able to maneuver us into it was the first place where we really felt grateful to have a van that was only 130 inch wheelbase and we were really glad that we didn't have a butt that stuck out or that sticks out my grammar is all over the place right now now i know that they were really just higher clearance areas and we were able to get away with it because we have a van that could kind of get away with being high clearance even though it's not high clearance because we have a short wheelbase in buena vista cole and i started a website that we never really finished it's through simplelens.com it's in my description for my free campsites that i sometimes update but not really because now that i'm traveling alone i don't really like people in them in my free spots because i feel weird about telling people where i am then from buena vista we went into denver um and moved on towards wyoming really quickly we did that because well we were really freaked out by denver and fort collins and really the entire strip of cities in colorado they were just really busy and we were sleeping at a walmart that was kind of sketchy that people were doing donuts at at 3am again still hadn't figured out freecampsite.net and still hadn't figured out seasonal travel so the weather was really hot so we moved on to wyoming this might have been our biggest mistake so far because i think from colorado we were doing all right it was hot kind of uncomfortable but we could have still turned it all around then we went into wyoming and i think we went the wrong way and we ran into hell ally it was really bad i had to unpack this basically the midwest has this natural phenomena called hail that i a californian i knew i know of hail i'm not dumb of course the little round ice pellets that when they hit your car it's like it sounds really loud that's what i knew about hale but in wyoming there's this hail that is the size of not only nickels but quarters golf balls and tennis balls and where we were staying in wyoming we were in cheyenne wyoming the south eastern portion we were smack dab in the middle of what they called the nebraska panhandle is what i think they called it could be wrong again i don't really know that much about this stuff i just know that it was really stressful because i started hailing one morning and i was like oh at the time i had was following one chick travels she's a girl curly haired girl who goes rock climbing and stuff she was in wyoming and she had talked about how she got caught in a hail storm and it broke her solar panels and it broke her fan and it dented her roof and all this stuff that was a day or two before we went into wyoming and then we went into wyoming and then the next morning we were woken up by hail so that morning within 20 minutes i was freaking out i think i pissed coleman off but i was like no no you don't understand like this is a brand new van i was super stressed out about the van again running theme we wished that we had a beater because we were making mistake after mistake now looking back on it i do think that if we just learned how to travel seasonally earlier we wouldn't have had so many issues that made us want a crappy van we just kept making mistake after mistake like i said so wrong place wrong time and so yeah within 20 minutes that morning we packed up and we left and we literally just kept driving until we got to south dakota at this point in our travels i think we were about two months in when we hit wyoming at this point we knew that we wanted to slow down but at the same time although we knew that we wanted to do less miles we still didn't have like i said the seasonal understanding of the weather patterns of the united states us lame newbie californians so we just kept getting ourselves into situations where we felt like we had to drive another eight hours within two days and it was just it was pretty bad i'm not gonna lie south dakota wasn't actually that bad we ended up on this really beautiful boondocking cliff where the bunch of other rvers were and we did have one night of bad bugs but it wasn't actually that bad we also got to witness a super super cool thunderstorm it was a really good place it was a little bit hot but it wasn't unbearable we had good service we were working on the website at the time and this was where i think i started filming my first youtube videos yeah south dakota that was fun time but again because we're newbies we didn't stay long enough and we wanted something prettier because although south dakota was more comfortable it was kind of bland it wasn't like the most breathtaking crazy place in the entire world it was comfortable enough like i said to do work and stuff but although i wanted to make travel more of a lifestyle there's a running theme where i want to kind of chill out at a campsite and do some work and stuff and coleman wanted to go travel and see new things and so a place like south dakota there wasn't really that much to see so we kind of felt like we were in the wrong place and so we moved on again us dumb kids my gosh and so we kept going in the wrong direction and we went to fargo north dakota fargo north dakota was cool it was like a little college town it was the first place that we'd been to in a while that it actually felt like wearing a mask wasn't a bad thing um what else it was hot as balls that's where we stayed at a campsite on a little lake that we actually really enjoyed coleman and i both enjoyed and that was the week that coleman got the call from his parents saying ring ring can you please come home kobe 19 is very large and we need more workers because the fire season is literally out of this world and so he went home for a month the dogs and i were on our own the first couple nights on our own when coleman flew out of fargo i was really scared because although i am a solo female traveler i've traveled by myself in the past i mean i was expecting to live alone and build the band by myself and all this kind of stuff i was still really scared to be alone i was apprehensive i was i think i just talked about this in one of my last videos so i'm not going to go too in depth about it but my first night alone cole's flight flew out at like 7 30 i think i dropped him off at seven and i immediately went into minnesota when i went straight to minneapolis and there i met a couple named greta and giles and they actually knocked on my door and i hadn't really talked to anybody at this point i was by myself and i had two dogs i had cali and finn because callie couldn't go home with coleman because he was flying out and i was really stressed out and scared and it was really nice talking to them and they i was kind of apprehensive about minneapolis's humidity again the seasons and they told me that i should go to lake superior i should go to two harbor i should go up the coast to duluth to get away from the humidity and to enjoy some of the windier weather that the lake has to offer and so i did the night that i talked to them i actually again shot up way too quickly to two harbors although i don't consider this actually a mistake i don't consider any of it a mistake but this for sure i liked two harbors a lot it wasn't a mistake i spent three or four nights in two harbors a couple things about this area though i realized that van life isn't very popular in places like minnesota or north dakota it's more rv life which is not a bad thing necessarily but i now know that i way prefer van life areas to rv areas there's just a completely different vibe and minnesota in general it was really hard to find free places to stay there was plenty of pay to camp campsites and two harbors there was nowhere i actually ended up calling the non-emergency police office in two harbor and talking to the sheriff about where he thought i could stay as a rest area i said that i was only saying for eight hours i ended up staying five days kind of hopping from place to place but he actually had a lot of good information to tell me i think that's actually something that not very many people talk about but i now know if i'm somewhere where van life isn't super popular i can call the non-emergency sheriff office and they're gonna be really really nice as long as you're really nice to them and you're not like gonna stay for more than a night there's no weirdness at all a couple days into two harbors although i had talked to the sheriff's office and got the okay to stay at a couple different places most of the places i wasn't really comfortable staying in because they were kind of creepy like an abandoned grocery store i ended up staying one night at a rest area where i got honked at very rudely and so i was kind of freaked out by it again there was no vans i kind of felt like people were looking at me like i was bad or like i was not welcomed or like i was homeless it was i guess it was like an area where if you live in a van you're homeless you're not living in it because you're choosing to live in it that's the vibe that i got so i got a lot of dirty looks and i felt very uncomfortable in minnesota the only really big thing that happened in minnesota was i actually ended up going to get a haircut for the first time in like a year and on my way to go get a haircut i was driving to duluth which is a bigger city near two harbor two harbor is a very small town duluth is the big town south of it as i was driving i was on these freeways very very large freeways very busy freeways traffic everywhere cali australian shepherd starts kind of dancing in the passenger seat like she's not okay at this time she was having some abnormal poops long story short as i was taking the exit because i thought she had to go poop as i was taking the exit she starts pooping all over the place but it wasn't actually poop it was like this vomit that was coming out of her bottom half most disgusting thing that i've ever smelled seen had to deal with had to clean up it was all over my passenger seat all over my floor it was all over her not too long after that and the honking and the weird feeling in minnesota i ended up booking it how many times am i gonna say that i ended up booking it back to north dakota where i stayed again at the lake that coleman and i had stayed at previously i actually stayed here for about a week and while i was here some other things happened hail happened actually like i said hail had been something that i'd actually been stressing about this entire time i know that i haven't been saying it now but that's because now i'm no longer stressed about it at the time every single night i was just kind of quaking in my boots and every single time that rain would hit my roof i mean it was bad i was i'm still scarred from it honestly when rain hits my roof now i'm just like i can't help but have the knee-jerk reaction of i want to like scream and cry and freak out there was actually a night where there was a thunderstorm where i got a couple pictures of lightning bolts and stuff it was i thought it was pretty cool but then the next morning wasn't so cool because hail came and it was like 3 a.m and it was hailing on my van and i couldn't tell how big the hail was and i was so worried about it when rain was in the forecast i would actually be able to look the day of and see what the predicted size of the hail was which was actually the scariest part of all of it and whenever it said bigger than nickel size i figured you know what either i need to run or i need to hide and in order to hide my van i learned to throw my comforter up on the roof there was one morning where i woke up at 3am to the sound of rain that ended up turning into hail and while it was hailing and it was thunderstorming i got out of my van in the dark i wiggled my comforter all the way up onto my roof to cover my solar panels and my fan i also have a little down blanket that i was using as well it was not fun it was really stressful it's not even that great of a story because nothing super bad happened it just it was just the fear that i felt that was really scary and because of those nights i booked it again to where was i bismarck capital of north dakota there we actually found a really cool free camping there was these places in north dakota that were like wildlife nope no they were like fishing recreational land or something they weren't blm land or national forest then they were fishing recreation land and you could stay 14 days just like you can in blm land and it was actually a really cool place on a lake that the dogs and i were really enjoying until i think about eight hours after i arrived and i was all kinds of psyched about it i had just bought the drone i was taking drone pictures it was really fun and really cool and i was super super psyched about the spot until i saw some turquoise scum on the side of the lake now i had heard about blue-green algae before not in depth i'm not somebody who would really know that much about it but i knew that it existed didn't know what it could do didn't know what it would do to the dogs if they swam in it or ingested it or anything i ended up calling a veterinarian who ended up telling me to call the wildlife people in the area to tell me if there's actually an active blue-green algae warning on the lake and when i called them they said that there was so i ended up calling the vet back and they said they couldn't take me and that there was no emergencies clinics for like four hours until fargo but they did tell me that it was really bad they told me that i needed to get to a vet so i called the emergency vet in fargo and they told me to call poison control and tell them my story and they would kind of make a case number for both dogs and all the other good stuff i did that and poison control was the first people who really told me what was going on because everyone was saying i need to go to the vet but nobody was telling me actually what was going on and it was really i was so freaked out poison control told me that with blue green algae there's two different strands one strand will kill your dog within two hours and one will kill your dog within four hours so yeah i ended up going to the vet where they got me in immediately and they got like charcoal something and some shots and some other things and stuff for their kidneys and at the end of the day they didn't get sick thank god anyway i'm very very grateful that i didn't have to actually deal with anything bad it was really stressful though and i ended up having to go farther east than i wanted to because at this point i was trying to get into montana yeah because of this blue green algae scare i ended up doing my last and i booked it into montana which was the first good decision that i've made this entire time it totally was on accident i didn't mean to go to the perfect place i just ended up in the perfect place montana is a good place to be in the summer who would have known the northern rockies specifically are a good place to be in the summer because they're nice and cool so i ended up going to a lake called henry's lake that was about 20 minutes um away from west yellowstone and i fell in love you guys it was amazing there was no bugs the temperature was like 70 which i hadn't felt in months at this point the dogs were happy my neighbors were van lifers which had never happened up until this point this is where i met third yandle wake up kevin who ended up doing a van tour who ended up also inspiring me to start a youtube channel montana was a turning point for me for so many different reasons it was the first time that i realized what i wanted out of van life it was the it was where i started youtube it was where i realized what seasonal travel was it's where i discovered freecampsites.net the desktop version and really the rest of montana was a breeze i think i was exactly three months in to my travels at this point i stayed at henry's lake for a long time probably like 14 or 18 days but i was going a couple days here and there to bozeman so i wasn't actually at the lake for 14 days yeah bozeman's really cool and this is really cool cameron is where cole and i have thought about doing a little tiny house or something and i really liked west yellowstone i was kind of a local in west yellowstone it became my home and after two weeks of being there i didn't want to leave but i did and i went up to kalispell aka the area where glacier national park is like the prettiest area in montana kind of back into the wooded areas similar but less creepy to the woods in washington i'm just i'm not really a big tree gal i like the deserts i like being able to sleep in free places where i have the wide open sky and i can see 360 degrees around me 50 yards every way or more like a mile in every way at some times i don't know i like knowing that people are around me i like knowing what situation i'm in that's also where coleman flew back in so he flew back into kalispell we did a couple of days up there before moving back down to henry's lake area because it was starting to get really cold uh we went to some hot springs near idaho and then we did henry's lake for a couple days did some renovations on the van and then this is the turning point where i don't really want to talk about it very much but basically coleman and i had to go through this entire process of realizing that the road wasn't the right place for the two of us and it was a really hard realization for us it was really stressful because i didn't really want to be alone on the road it's not my preference by any means we found ourselves in utah because we were like let's go home basically we made our way home and i think i stuck around home for about a week or two to recuperate and kind of figure out what i was gonna do and then i obviously decided to get back on the road by myself and i took off on a couple trips to myself i did a little bit of humboldt california is so hard to van life in so i'm not really gonna talk about it very much the takeaways from california van life are that it's more like van dwelling in california not van lifeing it's really hard to find good free places to stay that are legal also i was having a bunch of electrical issues because that was when i didn't realize that my battery had two different shutoff settings and complicated electrical stuff that i still don't really understand and then about a month ago i went back home because i had electrical issues and then a couple days later i took off on my arizona portion of my journey which is the part of the journey that i'm in currently wow it's really weird to talk about the past and the present because it feels like two different me's i feel like i'm talking about two different people it's strange anyways hello everybody sorry for the jarring change of scenery a different time different location couple weeks later but i couldn't finish this video where i was with the camera battery that i was using so now i'm here and i'm gonna finish this out so the last month of my travels has been the best month that i've ever had in my entire life i have finally felt like i have grown in to this lifestyle i've realized the resources to use i've realized the kind of places to go i've realized that i like being around other people and other vans i like not being in the boonies i like following the crowds i like feeling comfortable and over the course of the six months and all the mistakes that i made i have learned the hard way the things that make me feel comfortable in the things that make me feel uncomfortable i'm a lot better off for it this last leg of my journey started out in alabama hills i love alabama hills it is very me after alabama hills i got to spend a couple of days with coleman and his family during thanksgiving week we ended up doing some of joshua trees some hot springs near the 395 and then right after they left i went ahead and booked it two hours to quartzite and i spent three nights and four days in quartzite kind of just put putting around enjoying making videos creating videos figuring out my creative voice i still haven't quite figured it out but i am getting closer and that's all i can really ask for so yeah quartzite was cool and then i ended up moving on pretty quickly from quartzite towards sedona because i knew that i had a limited amount of time until christmas and i went i knew that i wanted to be home for christmas so so i got to sedona i spent a whole two weeks in sedona most pristine place that i've ever experienced i it's just a really cool place and not only is it a cool place but it also makes you feel something just something about the place is just magical i've finally learned how to slow down i've learned now how to pick places that fit not only my requirements but also finn's requirements and now three days ago i booked it home i had to come home for christmas it's just the thing you know i wasn't gonna not drive home so i drove home

Channel: Mariah Alice

Views: 214,952

Keywords: mariah alice, my first six months living in a van, my first six months of van life, van life one year in review, things i wish i'd known before i started van life, solo female van life, van life regrets, van life mistakes, full time van life, off grid van life, ford transit camper, ford transit van life, seasonal travel van life, how to, van life, vanlife, an honest conversation about van life, six months of van life, six months nomadic, van life six months on the road

Id: 8BHrv2PxmYQ

Length: 29min 54sec (1794 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020