Rob Sanchez
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#VANLIFE
​ADVENTURES

PHOTOS FROM THE ROAD

9/11/2018

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We didn't do a great job of documenting our trip as it was happening because we were too concerned about getting the "right" shots to post and making everything look insta-perfect. In retrospect we should've just posted what we had to share even more experiences with our friends and families. Hindsight is 20-20 but here's a bunch of the photos from the trip!
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Lessons from 4 weeks of #VANLIFE

7/8/2018

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4 weeks ago, Sara and I packed up a lot of what we had, sold the rest and prepared to hit the road. After almost 6 years living in the Bay Area, CA, we chose to pursue a dream 2 years in the making and to have a new experience in life. In that process, we left a lot of things behind that we loved: dozens of close friends, an amazing apartment in one of the only quiet areas in Silicon Valley, our routines and more. We really wanted to spend some extended time with family on the East Coast while exploring new places and also were looking forward to living a much, much cheaper lifestyle than we had in California. We planned to leverage this lower cost of living to get ourselves established in remote work so that we could become permanently location independent and have to make less tradeoffs between family and personal dreams. The plan was that I would pick up some freelance work in app design, product strategy and digital marketing to help pay the bills and cover the basics while also building out a lifestyle business for the future. Sara would explore all remote options to find something that really worked for her as well. 

Our outline for the rest of 2018 was that we would travel cross country in a van for 6 weeks, meet up with family in South Carolina for a bit, spend a couple months in Rhode Island with Sara's family, then make our way down to Florida where we would spend the winter months (we are big babies when it comes to weather below 60 degrees). While this plan sounds amazing in theory, it also means that we will be roaming and living without a home base for about 6 months. For a couple people who really do well with routines, structure and comfort, it was going to push us in a lot of ways. 

Over the course of the last 4 weeks, we've already learned a lot and are making some adjustments along the way. We've traveled to a lot of the places in California that we hadn't gotten to or just wanted to spend more time in. Right now we are in Sedona, which was the spot we were most looking forward to on the trip. It's a completely magical place that we absolutely fell in love with. We have several more stops planned on the way for the next few weeks and we are excited to see what the Universe has in store for us along the way. Here are some things we've learned and some adjustments we'll be making for the second half of the trip.

  • Slow down. With so many incredible things to see and only 6 weeks set aside for the cross country trip, it’s easy to feel pressure to see as much as possible and cram in as many stops as you possibly can along the way. Doing this in a van though, it’s pretty challenging having to figure out everything from scratch each day. Where are you going to sleep? Are there any campgrounds actually available? Where can we fill water? Where has good WiFi to work? Will our van break down (again) 😂? Some of these may sound simple, but these basics can actually consume a lot of your mental energy when you’re used to everything already being lined up for you. We've found ourselves doing less of the activities and personal goals than we thought we would be able to.
  • Give each other space. Traveling with two people plus a dog in an 80 sq ft van can be challenging sometimes. We are learning to consistently give each other personal time, rather than just taking space when you are arguing or getting frustrated. No one's every day life is spent with another person 100% of the time, so allow each other some space regularly.
  • Minimize, then minimize again. You probably don’t need as much as you thought. We minimized pretty hardcore before the trip, selling a lot of items and shipping the rest to Rhode Island and Florida (because who knows where in the country we’ll end up!). Even still, I think we’ve used about 15-20% of the things we brought, and in such a small space, the rest feels incredibly cluttered. On top of that, organization is key. Not having to search through all your stuff to find a toothbrush is crucial.
  • Travel your way. This is a big one for us. Watching #vanlifers on IG or your favorite travel influencers can have a big effect on your travel goals. But be real with yourselves on the way you want to travel/live and don’t let yourselves try to fit into someone else’s style. For us, we’ve always preferred slower travel and getting familiar with a place for longer periods before moving on to the next. We are happy that things will be slowing down when we get back to the East Coast and we'll have more time to explore the new area while having temporary home bases.
  • Buy a reliable van. This is a tricky one. Sara and I spent over a year getting our financial house in order so that we could have some freedom and breathing space while we made this leap. We don't use debt any more (thanks Dave!) so when it came time to buy the van, we used only what we could feel comfortable paying cash for. This meant we opted for a lower end van that cost us just about $6k. I figured that the whole conversion would cost somewhere in the range of $2-4k and that we would end up with a total cost of just under $10k. Well...that's not really how things went down. We ended up spending more in repairs on the van then we paid for the van itself and are still dealing with some breakdowns and fixes along the way. I'll probably make a post outlining the whole story, but given that we'd never done van travel, never made a private-party used car purchase and know close to nothing about cars, there's a lot that we've learned along the way.

Those are just the lessons so far, who knows what will happen in the coming weeks and months. But we are doing our best to keep a positive attitude and remember that this is an incredible experience that we're fortunate enough to get a chance to do and determined enough to commit to doing it. Ultimately we'll probably get more out of the challenges that we face than any of the things we'll see along the way. We are realizing that when you make such a dramatic change, you can't expect a completely smooth transition. It will take time to adjust to it and figure out how to make things work for you.

We'll try to keep updating things along the way. Thanks for following along! @drivingonsunshine
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  • About Me
  • Portfolio
    • App Design
    • Products
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    • Social Good
  • Launch Your App
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