VAN TOUR: AT 69 SOLO FEMALE COLLEGE PROF TURNS NOMAD

as i have become more and more involved in the nomad community i have discovered that this community encompasses people from such varied backgrounds with often incredible life stories it is my privilege today to bring my glow family one of these stories about a woman who has led a life of adventure on two continents then returned to school in her late 30s to become a college professor well guess what she's hit the road again and at age 69 is showing no signs of slowing down so come on let's go meet this fascinating lady well hello jane and thank you so much for inviting me into your lovely home with you and your companion is that tati okay and you said tati was ernest hemingway's nickname yes how appropriate since you were a professor of english at the college level so tell me how did you go from a classroom to a van what was the genesis behind that story well it's um something i've always wanted to do and um everything sort of came together in a serendipitous way i found a van i decided to leave my job um things just worked out so that i could do what i wanted to do all of my life is living in this van the first time you've really traveled by well by van or by vehicle or have you always had kind of a a urge to hit the road i was a single parent with three children and i picked them up from school one day and said you got everything because we're going to canada i had bought a van and i took my small children all the way up to vancouver and back and then about a year later i immigrated to australia and we lived there for about eight years and during that time i took my four children and um we backpacked up through we we backpacked we we walked we took buses we hitchhiked with four children and uh went all the way up the eastern seaboard of australia in fact we were staying at um youth hostels and one night i went in and you had these little passports that you have to give them um and i put down these five little passports and this woman looked at me and she says so you're the woman that's traveling with four children i've heard about you so apparently i was a bit of a legend on the backpacking trail in australia then we moved back to the united states and my kids grew up and got married they all own their own homes although they all have camping vehicles now you shared that you were a professor for 25 years but you just felt like there was something missing in your life and you wanted to for a lack of a better term or phrase you wanted to write your own story exactly that's a very good way of putting it yes i've been reading other people's stories for years and i decided i wanted to write my own so we were talking and you've been on the road for 18 months and i was asking you what your experiences have been with meeting people and the type of people you've met and you said to me 99 of people are good and that's what you found in the room that they're they're gracious and kind and will go the extra mile for you like the gentleman who came and jumped my car and i offered to pay me says oh no no you know it's um i think that that is the essence of america that um is not uh it's not people don't understand that because watching the news or watching things you know the media they just see the underbelly but i'm here to tell you that i have run into dozens and dozens of just wonderful people that i want to go back and visit sometime so as a nomad you as a single female nomad you haven't found that people are scary and frightening and it's a horrible experience where you're constantly worried about your safety uh only mechanics [Laughter] but as far as safety uh what i tell my my kids is hey i'm locked inside a big metal box you know and if somebody bothers me i just turn the key on and drive off so i'm probably safer than you might be in an apartment or a house so now just understand there are some days when i want to click my heels together and say there's no place like home there's no place like home and i'm thinking i'm just going to turn around and go home you know and then i never do because i think well then what are you going to do so you're in about you're telling me about 60 square feet of space here and let's take a look around and see how you utilize that space okay now as far as a kitchen the kitchen is you have a cabinet here that you were telling me you got from craigslist yes and and you use a simple butane stove yep all of your cooking is done on this toe yes okay and then you are also telling me that you're a minimalist and you don't have a lot of expensive systems so you have a simple water jug and i see you have a bowl here that you're going to connect you were telling me yes yes i'm going to put a hole in the bottom of the bowl and it will drain into a little uh water container in my cupboard now we talked about your kitchen but how do you sleep at night and where do you sleep at night this is my bed okay and it's probably about two or three inches too short and relatively tall so how does that work i just curl up okay so it doesn't pull out or anything it doesn't pull out this is it however i did make under here there's an extension that rests here and it makes it a little bit bigger okay and then i put this on top of that that was originally for the dogs the dog to sleep on yeah no she's not she won't she she sleeps with me in this bag yeah now of course everyone always wants to know how do you use the bathroom and how do you stay clean in here okay this is my second one this is a a porta potty i think it's a stem support and and i just have this on here because i sit on it sometimes okay and i line it with two of the heaviest duty uh trash bags i can find okay and um it can sound empty probably every two days all right and then it i thought the other thing i do is the kitty litter trick right yeah so it never smells that's pretty common with van and van dwellers and nomads now also you were telling me you don't have a refrigerator that plugs in you're using a cooler so you're using a cooler and what kind of cooler is this it's a treeline 45 quart and does that satisfy and fill all your needs yeah it's the best one i've had so far i've probably gone through about five of them oh really yeah and this one uh holds ice um at least not as much in the summer but during you know non-really hot weather it uh will keep us uh for five days so since you have such a minimalistic type of build do you have house batteries i do have two agm batteries along with a car battery they're more than sufficient for your needs now you had shared something very personal with me when we were talking early earlier rather that you had experienced an ordeal with breast cancer so do you want to share a little bit about that experience and the impact it's had on your overall perspective um yeah uh it's a it's a gift that cancer gives you and i know that sounds pretty um ridiculous but you get to realize that every day is a blessing the sunset is more beautiful you kind of want to take in everything you can and not worry so much about the little things i'm still working on that but i try not to worry about things that don't really matter one of the things i asked you is i said so what are your plans what are you and you said that you learned on the road not to really make plans and explain that how you came upon that philosophy best the best leg plans of mice and vans i don't know if everybody else travels like this i mean there's as many different ways of doing this as there are band dwellers but i um i tried to plan and then you know you're driving past something and you said that looks interesting maybe i'll go off here or you meet somebody and say oh have you seen this or a couple of times i've actually been lost and found the most amazing things when i was lost so um i i found that plans just don't really work out for me well we won't plan our next meet up or get together but when we do we'll tape it and share your story and what's happening then but we won't plan it but we'll plan on seeing each other one of these days down the road thank you so much jane for sharing your home and your time with us thank you

Channel: Glorious Life On Wheels

Views: 161,161

Keywords: 69 year old nomad, solo female van life, college professor turns nomad, senior van life, glorious life on wheels, van tour, simple van tour, budget van tour, rv living, nomad on land

Id: tnOb7Up2d9o

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021