Over the past few years I’ve started to clean house in an attempt to make our lives have less of an impact on the earth and be healthier for us. I’ve systematically started taking on different products and processes and finding ways to do them cleaner!

The beginning of the month looking back feels like a blur of work all day and working out way west in the evenings. By now fall was in full swing and the weather was starting to be cold and rainy more consistently.

Last week on Instagram I asked for people to send over their biggest questions about the full-time travel/vanlife/overlanding lifestyle because I wanted to answer them! I got a ton of great questions from people and I wanted to pass along the Q&A to you guys!

Over the years (wow it’s weird that we can say that), Owen and I get a lot of questions about life on the road and we’re ready to start tackling those questions one by one. First on the list? Free time on the road, how much we have and what we do with it!

We hope that you all had a great weekend! About a month ago, we were camped out in Lone Pine, California when a good looking Adventure Wagon Vanagon pulled into the spot next to us. Naturally, we needed to go over and say hi! The owner of the van, named Desert Rose, is Barry Vogel. He’s a civil rights lawyer with a long time "radio habit".

In our own research, we did not find a great deal of transparency on how to keep up your hygiene when you are living on the road. Dialing in a process to maintain our personal standards of hygiene has been a learning experience that has taken a great deal of refining.

About a month ago, we spent two weeks in the UK. Half of our time was in London, and the other half was spent exploring Wales. Reflecting on our time, we wanted to pass along some things that we discovered during our stay. This list just includes some of the things that we personally experienced, because we can truthfully speak to their greatness! This list includes our recommendations for London:

   Yup, you read that right... We each have just 1 cubic foot of space to store our clothes in the van. ONE. Buckle your seat belts people this is going to be a wild ride.

Let me back up and explain why we have such a small space to work with. When making the organizational plan for Stanley we decided pretty early on that our clothes were going to live under the back bench seat. It's perfect, there is plenty of space and it is easily accessible! It was not long that we realized that the space had to be shared by our two 6v batteries that control our aux power system...

There is not a more violating feeling than having your car broken into. To know that someone entered a space that you feel safe in, with no discretion for the things that are important to you will never feel good.

We were in downtown Miami and only away from Stanley 2 hours. He was parked in a public lot, sandwiched between two major roads, in broad daylight. As we walked up to the van I said, "I know I would have never parked in a spot with so much glass on the ground." I hardly made it through that sentence before I reached the passenger vent window to see glass all over the ground.

1. Watch you head...there is something to hit your head on everywhere
2. We could be 100% better at food planning. Going to the grocery store everyday is THE WORST
3. We need cooler weather then we thought we did. No AC has left us sweaty very sweaty

Planning
When planning our system we started with determining how much power we would need for three days without ANY sort of charge. No shore power, no solar, no alternator. This required lots of super fun research and math. Yay math! Ah(Amp Hours) is the unit that a deep cycle battery's capacity is measured in. To come up with the amount of Ah we needed for those three days without charge we took the items we use everyday and figured out their draw in Ah. This is where the math comes in.

Living in a van/traveling full time, though it’s becoming more common, is still a 180 degree turn from the way we are conditioned to live. As we prepare to leave, we understandably get a lot of questions about this. The most frequently asked are:  where are we going to first? There is no good answer to this question, but in all honesty, probably Target...because we always forget something!