“Home is where you roam.”
“Home is where you park it.”
Those charming slogans look great on a bumper sticker. And at first, when my partner and I began our two years living full-time in a self-converted camper van, chasing mountains, cool climbing lines, and a cheaper, freer lifestyle, they felt true.
But over time, the charm wore thin. After the van came the tiny house, where we’ve now lived for five years.
Both have given us lessons in minimalism, self-reliance, and adaptation, but if I had to pick a favorite? The tiny house wins, even if it’s not our ideal living situation.
Life on the road brought us freedom and fairly low bills
At first, van life was everything social media promised it to be: sunsets from mountain overlooks, coffee brewed with the back doors flung open, and a different backyard every few days.
It was pretty cheap, too. My partner and I bought a behemoth of a high-roof van new for about $40,000 in 2018. We spent three months and nearly $10,000 — nearly half of which went toward our fully off-grid solar setup — converting it to something we could live in.
We recouped our investment quickly, especially since we spent the following summer juggling several jobs while saving up to hit the road for an indefinite period.
We only had three relatively large recurring monthly expenses: the $400 loan payment on the van itself, $150 in insurance, and an average of about $200 a month in fuel, depending on how much we drove.
We utilized public land and the occasional Cracker Barrel parking lot for camping and boondocking, so we never spent a dime on campgrounds or RV parks.
Factoring in food and a slim recreational budget (which we often never used), our monthly cost of living hovered under $1,000.
However, this lifestyle came with some high costs that weren’t financial
The trade-off of free-wheeling, inexpensive living was everything else. First, there was the omnipresent stress of having everything you own in one compact wheeled thing that begs, “Steal me!”
It also wasn’t easy living in a home that could break if you hit a pothole just wrong … or, in my case, misjudged the height of a stump questing for a backroad campsite.
Seeing friends and family meant long drives, taking showers meant going to public gyms, and having privacy meant … well, there wasn’t any.
Nothing in van life was guaranteed, not even something as simple as having a safe place to sleep at night.
I certainly don’t miss the unique stress of trying to find a place to park and not knowing whether we would wake up surrounded by cops or cows or an angry farmer because following a county road after dark unwittingly led us onto private land — all things that happened to us during our two-year tenure on the road.
Freedom, I learned, can feel a lot like instability.
And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we suddenly felt like the community equivalent of an unwanted creepy uncle at the family reunion.
Though we practiced social distancing to the extreme, often spending weeks at a time parked in the middle of nowhere without encountering another soul, the second we pulled into a grocery-store parking lot with our out-of-state license plates for a biweekly supply restock, we were repeatedly given scornful looks and told to “stay home.”
Never mind that the van was our home — the only one we had. All in all, it’s hard to feel settled when your existence feels temporary in everyone else’s eyes.
Eventually, we traded our four wheels for four walls
When those pressures finally got to us, we hung up our van-lifer jackets and parked the van for good on a rented lot in front of a brand-new 400-square-foot tiny house.
Suddenly, we had running water, electricity that didn’t rely on a sunny day, and enough space to cook a full meal without bumping elbows.
The immediate financial stress, however, was undeniable.
Our mortgage and lot rent combined cost double our van payment (which we were also still paying off). Utility costs went from a $30 propane tank refill a month to electricity, water, gas, and internet bills that combined to cost a whopping $350 on average.
When adding the cost to furnish the house and buy a used vehicle to serve as our everyday all-season driver (a financial headache in its own right), our hard-earned reserves were quickly depleted.
At the same time, the tiny home gave us a tenuous sense of belonging and stability we didn’t realize we were missing.
We now have an address to receive mail at, we know our neighbors, we can plant herbs in the yard, and we can sit on a porch that doesn’t roll away with the wind.
I’ve thought a lot about what ‘home’ really means
If I could only keep one version of tiny living, it’d be the house — not because it’s easier or perfect, but because it feels like ours.
I won’t say I don’t miss the untethered freedom to simply drive to warmer climates when I’m shoveling snow from the driveway or the near-viscous silence of a desolate campsite in the mountains when I’m listening to our neighbors’ dogs bark incessantly at 3 a.m.
However, I can’t say I’d go back on the road right now. I love the quiet, simple mornings of waking up to water tanks that aren’t frozen and being able to sit in my rocking chair with a cup of coffee, thinking about the art I want to make that day.
If van life taught me anything, it’s that part of the joy in traveling is the periods of stillness in between that make you restless for the road in the first place. Without a waking reality in between, the dream of perpetual motion becomes unspectacular.
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