The Beginning of the Journey

On June 23, 2023 my life changed drastically, though I didn’t know it at the time. That day my wife of 32 years had a stroke. At that point, I felt there was hope that she would recover and all indications were that she would. She had suffered some damage to the speech and cognitive functions, but it looked as if she would recover in time. As the summer went on, it become more and more apparent that she would not fully recover as there were multiple setbacks. I began wondering what the rest of my life would be like. I loved her and I would have been happy taking care of her, but I also wanted more from life. I had been thinking that for some time. Starting in early August, things started looking increasingly more bleak. She died on October 5, 2023.

I reflected on my life with her and my life as a widower of 57. To make matters more complex I now had to deal with my father in law who had suffered a stroke not long before my wife died. His wife and son were already dead. He had no one else left to turn to. He died on November 30, 2023. When he died, it was truly like my life  of 32 years was gone, I had spent a lot of time with my wife and her family in Central Pennsylvania. Standing in the cemetery while looking at the plot where my father in law would be buried along with some of my wife’s ashes, I felt a complete sense of loss. It was time to move on and start to think about a new chapter in my life, eventually. I found myself becoming considerably less happy being at home. I started thinking more and more about selling my house and moving elsewhere. I just wanted quite sure where. I knew I wanted to travel as much as possible as I had always had a desire to explore new places. My wife wasn’t particularly keen on traveling in the last few years.

In May 2024, I met a truly remarkable woman named Susan. Susan is someone who very much enjoys life, loves traveling, and experiencing the nature of the place she is in. When I met her, she had recently finished traveling around the United States in a Airstream trailer visiting several National Parks with a good friend. She talked to me a lot about her love of nature, her desire to travel more extensively, her love of painting, and her desire to just live simply. One of Susan’s dreams was to travel the country while living in a van. The more time I spent with her, I realized that I wanted to have a relationship with her. She soon become someone truly special to me. We had been dating about six months and the idea of living in a van seemed very appealing as it would not only be an inexpensive way to travel, but also an easy way to get away from my former life in Central Pennsylvania. Around the same time, the company I was working for filed bankruptcy. While there was no certainty that the company would shut down any time soon or that I would be laid off, I was not happy with the job anyway and the two hours per day of commuting was getting increasingly more tiresome. I decided that the van life would be a perfect way to start fresh and to continue building a relationship with Susan. So, in late October 2024 I bought a cargo van that we would build out to travel and live in for as long as possible. I figured that with the sale of my house and what I had in savings, I would be OK financially for a while. Susan is retired and also wanted to get of the house she had been renting for the past year because it was getting harder to stay afloat on a limited income. As we were discussing the idea of living in a van and traveling, she told me about how we could potentially live on about $3000 per month at the most. We will have to see how that goes, but we are quite confident we can do that. I will be keeping track of our expenses and share that information.

Why a Van

When Susan and I decided that we wanted to travel the country, we looked at several options before finally settling on the idea to purchase a cargo van that we would convert into a camper ourselves. We knew we wanted a van in order to be able to easily navigate small towns and camp in National Parks. Most National Park campsites are limited to vehicles no more than 25 feet long. Susan told me about the limitations of traveling with in an Airstream such as not easily being able to pull over at scenic overlooks and not being able to park easily. We also decided we wanted four wheel or all wheel drive in order to get into some more remote places and we wanted to have enough storage space for various types of adventure gear.

We visited several RV dealerships and there were a couple that we liked. We particularly liked the Ekko and the Sunseeker models. However, as I did some research it seemed that build quality of most RVs were just not that great. We also had so many ideas for the layout of the van, the look we wanted, and the equipment we wanted. So, we finally settled on purchasing a new 2024 Mercedes Benz Sprinter 3500 170 inch extended van with all wheel drive. We decided on that particular model because we wanted to have plenty of curb weight available and because we wanted to place the bed for sleeping along the length of the van, north to south, rather than the width, east to west, since I am about 6’2” tall.