How and why we got into VanLife?
Traveling has always been in our blood, that is how this universe has brought us together(Kalee from USA and Senadin from Bosnia lived our whole life on opposite sides of the world and somehow ended up together, more on this topic on Kalee’s blog HERE). Back to the topic, how and why we got into VanLife. Our original plan was not to explore van life at this time but it definitely was sometime in our life, most likely near future.
A little bit of back story…
Since getting together, we’ve kind of settled and worked really hard and achieved a lot of things that people wish to achieve when they’re in their 40’s or 50’s.
When i say things i mean on buying our own house, car etc. We’ve achieved all this stuff so quickly and then we were both like “NOW WHAT?”
We settled down in a really small beach town on the island(Kalee’s hometown) with the house right by the ocean, bought our dream car, it just felt like a perfect place to be, but in my mind it was like perfect place to retire, and we are only in our twenties, we don’t want to retire, there is so much more out there waiting to be seen and explored. I just never felt fully satisfied with everything(i was not ungrateful, it just didn’t feel right), I always felt that a piece of a puzzle was missing.
As a kid my dreams were to live by the ocean and buy my dream car(Bmw X6) which i eventually achieved, but that was the moment when i realized that, it was actually not my dream, my dream was to travel, explore new places and cultures, meet new people, i realized more and more that experiences is what matters, material stuff comes and goes, experiences are something you can just remember and it will bring a smile on your face.What is the point of all the material stuff if you will be stuck in one place and let the life go by?
This whole situation encouraged both of us pretty much in the same time to make a drastic change, as both of our souls were missing something big, and that was TRAVEL. Our first try to escape into different type of lifestyle was about to be a drastic change, we planned a 6 month long backpacking trip throughout Southeast Asia and then see where life brings us next, just the two of us with just backpacks on our backs and roam free without a plan or worry. It sounded like a dream to both of our traveling souls.
Pretty quickly we started gathering all necessary things needed for such an experience, i mean on backpacks, hiking shoes, simple clothes outfits, travel gadgets, research about places to go, and we even bought our one-way plane ticket and announced it to our families about our crazy plans. All of this happened in December 2019 with a plan to leave by May 2020… and you can already guess that our plans got crushed by crazy year of 2020.
We were really sad because of the situation but there was really nothing we could do, but we definitely both knew that we didn’t want this to stop us in changing our lifestyle.
And then we both decided, VANLIFE it is!!!
As it was already something on our list after we backpacked Southeast Asia, this was the best decision we could’ve made. We quickly sold our dream car and purchased a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 170 wheel base extended, pretty much the longest van on the market(i think). This step made us so happy because we did that first big step out of our comfort zone and settled lifestyle. We didn’t have our dream car anymore, but that didn’t make us sad because we felt like we’re getting our dream life in return.
We immediately set ourselves a timeframe for our Van build, so we don’t waste too much time. Goal is to leave by May 2021(i know, May again, hopefully this will be the lucky one). We felt pretty confident with doing our van conversion ourselves because we’ve already had prior experience when we remodeled our whole house 90% ourselves, van conversion can’t be much different we thought…
Let’s see how we do, you can join us on this adventure by following our socials, we post our content on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and maybe Facebook, we’ll see how much time we got, you can find all links to our socials at the bottom of this page. C’ya around…
All of my content is completely free and I’m glad if I can help, i never want the cost to stop someone from living your dream life, but if you’re feeling generous and this post helped you You can go to our YouTube channel and click thanks below any of the videos, and i’ll keep working towards keeping this website up and creating even more content.