Sandy was living on $1,200 a month on the road. At 61, after 20 years in the military, she sold her business, sold two houses, and drove off in a school bus she built herself named the Command Post.

She started in a Toyota Prius with a pop up tent, and the trick she used with that tent solved two problems at once.

In this episode I tell you her whole story. How she picked her very first stop on purpose because she didn't know one single person out there. The breakdown in a national forest with no cell service, fuel leaking on the ground, and why she called a mobile mechanic instead of a tow truck. The three questions she asks herself before she lets herself panic. Her rule for stretching fuel money. The garage sale rack she put in the middle of her living room to get from two houses down to a van.

And the thing she said to me once that changed how I talk to myself.

Her name is Sandy. She travels alone on purpose. Her answer to where are you going next is my favorite answer anybody has ever given me.

Ten days. Almost three thousand kilometers. One camper van with no heater, no wifi, and a rented sleeping bag she almost said no to.

I met her in line at FlyOver in Reykjavik and I dragged her back to the apartment I was staying in so you could hear this.

She's from the Netherlands. She worked non stop for years, lived for the job, and hated it. So this year she decided every euro she made was going into adventures instead of things. She answered a Facebook post from a stranger, got on a plane after one Zoom call, and spent four weeks in Iceland training Icelandic horses for free room and board.

Then she rented the cheapest van she could find on Google and drove the Ring Road backwards from the way everybody tells you to do it.

In here: how she found campsites for 15 to 21 euros a night using nothing but flags on Google Maps, why she skipped the wifi, how she got popular spots to herself, what she did on the one day the weather went bad, and why her hiking boots have holes in them after ten days. Paragliding. Ice climbing. Snorkeling between two tectonic plates. A mountain she climbed clipped to a rope the day before her flight home.

She bought one magnet the whole trip. Everything else was an experience. And then her mother saw the bank account.

If you've been sitting at your kitchen table thinking Iceland is for other people, start here.

Justine bought her bus sight unseen in South Carolina in 2019. The brake line blew off the engine before she pulled out of the parking space.

That was the easy one.

A few years later she's rolling down a highway outside New Haven at night, in the rain, with the brake pedal on the floor and 70 miles to go to her brother's house. No shoulder. No place to park a bus. She puts it on cruise control at 35 and times the traffic lights.

We talk about that night, the three days stuck in a festival parking lot in Georgia, and the mobile mechanic in Waterloo, New York who took her money and broke more than he fixed.

You'll get the stuff that actually helps. How to find parts nobody sells to the public. Why you learn the color and smell of every fluid in your rig. What roadside service she uses and why. And the one thing I told her after her first few breakdowns that took the fear out of all of it.

More on breakdowns over at ShesTravelsSimple.com.

My friend Terry called and said she got us reservations in Banff. I said sure. Then I pulled up a map and found out Banff is twenty five hundred miles from my driveway and halfway to Alaska.

I have a van built to sleep in. I took the car instead.

Here's why I made that call and how I made it work. The mattress, the window film, the toilet behind the passenger seat, the trunk I didn't know I had. And the part I wasn't expecting, which is getting out after eight hours of driving feeling like I'd only driven two.

If you don't have a van and you've been wondering if a car is enough, it's enough. I did it for a month and I'm not sorry.

Lizzy thought about hitting the road for ten years and decided it wasn't possible. Then her office went away. She bought a 20 foot school bus off Facebook Marketplace, already converted by somebody else, and drove it for four years with two dogs and no idea what she was doing. This one has the answer to the question that stops most people: no, you don't have to build a bus to live in a bus. Also a stranger, a campfire, a serpentine belt, and 75 Cracker Barrels.

This is Her Journey Her Way. Solo travel stories for women starting over. Van life, car camping, school bus conversions, and the road trips that changed people.

I'm going to tell you their stories. What they risked. What it cost. What they'd do different if they had it to do over.

I'm not going to tell you it's easy. I'm going to tell you it's possible, over and over and over, until you believe me.