Our family moves into our van

Back when we were living in our house we bought our old but beloved VW Westfalia. Having the van really enabled us to travel easily with a baby and a toddler. Camping was as easy as parking, popping up the top, and making ourselves at home in our campground. We have made so many amazing memories in our van.

Fast forward to a couple years later to June 1st, 2016. We just finished packing our van, said goodbye to our home and were ready to hit the road! There was no harsh time frame, no actual destination, and we hadn’t came up with a plan further than, “we are a family of 4 living in our van”. We took our time and ended up driving the coast from Northwest Washington down to San Fransisco and back. Josh would drive and I would enjoy the ride, or I would drive and he would try to get some work done on the go.

We learned a few important things while traveling with our kids in the van.

• I had to learn to go with the flow and have no real expectations for my day other than a family adventure.
• We found it worked best when we would have destination goals, but not to be bound by those goals. If we didn’t make it as far as we had hoped, it wasn’t really a big deal.
• Driving for hours a day with 2 toddlers is sometimes exhausting. Take a lot of fun stops along the way.
• Never pass up a great beach.
• Get rid of the fear of not planning. Something I did in this situation, and still do often in life, is picture the worse case scenario in my mind. For this trip my worse case scenario was that we would not have a campsite or somewhere to sleep at night. Once I started thinking about “the what ifs” I quickly started thinking about the solutions for those worse case scenarios. We did sleep in a Walmart parking lot in an odd town one evening and we are alive to tell the tale ;) . We actually had an amazing time sleeping in the parking lot and will do it again one day i’m sure.
• NEVER pass up the opportunity to visit the happiest place on earth (Disneyland)

Here are just a few of the amazing moments we made on this trip: