from the van

After quite a while of barely missing each other on the road, I was finally able to catch up with Taylor & Chris Allen to have a conversation at Tiny Fest, CA. They'd just gotten back into San Diego from an extended stay down in Baja California. We discussed their history migrating into the van from house life to boat life. We talked about their theories on caravanning, their own style of travel, and the moves their making in the nomadic business space. I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

Follow them at

@adventureallens

@musclesonthemove

adventureallens.com

I drove up on the bluff to walk the dog one day and caught wind of this woman giving stick 'n poke tattoos in the back of a van. This is a story you probably won't find anywhere else. So I tracked down her contact and set up the interview, slightly worried I should've done a little more due diligence to make sure it was wise to interview her. Kat turned out to be an absolute delight: clever, funny, and bravely honest with a dude she just met. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to her. And I don't know shit about tattoos, so there's a decent primer for the novices out there in this episode too. Enjoy it. I surely did.

Ellie is a rad woman with whom I became quite good friends over the pandemic lockdown. We originally met up with her boondocking with some of our other vanlife friends on BLM land outside of Bend, OR. Since then, we've kept in touch and keep meeting up to hang out whenever we're in the same area. I was stoked to finally get to sit down and record a conversation with her about her transition into van life and outlook on the whole situation.

Hey friends! It's been a while. With the whole pandemic thing really putting a damper on in-person hangs, I kinda decided 60 episodes was a good round number at which to put the pod on hold. Now, I'm ready to reboot. I'm going through all the old footage and ruminations of the last couple of years, and I'm going to try to put out new stuff that will prove useful both on the YouTube channel as well as the podcast. Hopefully I'll be able to start interviewing folks like old times in the somewhat near future. But for now, let's try this.

Seth and our buddy, Dave, built out his Sprinter camper in like 3 weeks, which has got to be some sort of record. Also odd, he moved full-time into his van right as the COVID-19 locked down much of California and the world. But he stayed stoked anyway, because that's what Seth does. We had a good socially distant chat about all of that just as Southern California began to experiment with reopening much of its businesses and public space.

Melanie is a trumpet player and part time van lifer from Tasmania. I miss hanging out with podcasts guests in my van, but the upside of the current state of the podcast is that I got wonderful insights about van life across the world from a quite pleasant Australian I may have never actually spoken to otherwise. 

Johnny lives part-time in a low top Ford Transit traveling around New England photographing headshots for colleges. The Coronavirus outbreak sent him back to hunker down on his property in southern Alabama. Since then, he's been hosting van lifers like John, giving them a place to post up rather than having to navigate life on the road during lockdown.

Megan is a good friend of ours who lives in a beautiful Sprinter. For 6 weeks, she's been self isolating on public lands in the Southwest. We hopped on a zoom call to talk to her about her experience quarantining outside. We had a great chat about how mountain biking, her experience with solitude in the outdoors, and how this whole coronavirus situation might affect her van life timeline in the future.

Madelyn, Caleb, and Christian have all been on the podcast before... before Corona. Now, Madelyn and Caleb are hunkering down at an uncle's property in Texas. Christian is temporarily posted up in Idyllwild, CA. We got on a video conference to record a podcast about how we're all coping with van life during the pandemic. We talked epic trip they took together. We speculated about what this means for the van community going forward. It was fun, and surprisingly sort of uplifting.