MOVING BACK INTO THE VAN (life update)

It's true. Distance really does make the heart grow fonder. We are officially moving back into the van. We're gonna make some much needed upgrades, and then we're heading off on a big adventure.

We're Kara and Nate. After traveling to 100 countries, 2020 brought us back to the US where we bought a converted sprinter van to explore our own backyard.

That's the intro that we used for the majority of our videos last year. And if we're being completely honest, I never thought we'd use it again.

So we had, let's call it, naive optimism that once 2020 was over, we were going to get back on airplanes, travel.

And fly to foreign countries again. But unfortunately, the pandemic did not get the memo that it was supposed to go away when the new year started.

We're still hopeful that we'll be able to travel internationally at some point this year, but we're coming to terms with the fact that it won't be anytime soon.

We have decided to move back into the van. We're going to embrace the rest of our time here in the US and set another big goal for ourselves.

Okay.

It has been just over a year since we reached our 100 country goal, which feels crazy. And learning how to live in a van full time and keeping a travel channel going during a pandemic was all the challenge we could handle in 2020. But now that it's a new year, we're feeling like we need some direction and a new challenge.

I feel like this has been the obvious direction to go with our channel for a while now, but we've been hesitant to commit until now because, you know, it's been a pandemic.

But it is official, the new goal for this channel over the next several months is to visit all 50 states.

To us, this just feels like an exciting way to end this season of van life. We want to be able to look back at this time that we spent in the van and be able to point to something that we've accomplished. Don't get me wrong, all of the aimless wandering we've done in the past year has been great, but we're just feeling like we need a little more direction this year.

We have lots more details that we want to share with you around this goal later in the video. But first, we need to make some much needed upgrades to the van before we start season two of Van Life.

And the snow.

Quite heavy.

Try not to cut it. Wow.

So a few weeks ago, we rented a Winnebago revel that cost $150,000. It had all kinds of cool features, like a remote control bed, four wheel drive, a cool paint job, an outdoor shower. And we honestly thought that experience was going to make us more discontent moving back into our van. But we realized we don't really need all of those fancy things. Instead, it got us thinking about the. The less fun, more behind the scenes changes that we could make in our van that would make the biggest difference in our overall happiness.

So we made a list of all the things that annoy us about living in the van and narrowed it down to our top three.

Three.

And these are what we're gonna try to fix.

So the bed situation is the only place where the fancy feature in the Revel really would have solved all of our problems. And when we got back from that trip, we were determined to put a remote controlled elevator bed in this van. But unfortunately, after standing here and just staring at it for about an hour, trying to figure out how it would work, reality set in. First of all, it would be a couple thousand dollars just to get the parts to make the bed. Secondly, we would lose all of this storage up here, which we were willing to do until we realized all of our electrical is wired to this cabinet. And if you've seen any of our vlogs from the last nine months, then, you know, we just got our power situation under control, so we're not going to touch that.

So we've opted for a solution that requires no construction. And you might laugh, but I actually think this is going to work. This is it.

It's going to solve all of our problems.

No, it's going to solve half of our problem. Oh, it fits perfect.

It's already expanding. All right.

Wow. Wow. I need to get it flipped right before it expands quickly.

All right. Getting a cramp.

So it is just a mattress topper, but there's a little more strategy behind it.

Wow. What do you think?

I don't know yet.

First impressions? Was this a terrible idea? It is so soft. You could have the rest of the bed. Okay. And I could just sleep like this every night.

All right.

Wow.

This thing is definitely bigger than I thought it was gonna be. This was all Nate's idea. Just any step.

Just wait till I get the sheets on before you pass judgment. Thank you for washing these, by the way. You're welcome. Smell much better than usual.

I don't know about this.

I think it's gonna be great. The van is gonna be so much cozier and comfortable. Wait, Maybe if we turn it around. Yeah. So when it folds out. It just, like, flops. Yeah. Okay, this is gonna be good. Now it just. We just fold it out like this whenever we want to go to sleep. And then you just go over.

Oh, wow.

It is so soft.

It's pretty amazing. Wow. Wow.

I love it. It's so squishy.

All right, so it's obvious that we have increased the comfort of our bed. All right, but let's see if it's actually, like. Let's see if this works.

We're really good at sleeping. Like, we really don't have to have a perfect mattress to sleep.

Well, that's what happens when you travel to countries.

We slept in a different bed, like, every week for four years.

But this bed is just not comfortable. Thanks.

Oh, wow.

I can't wait to just sleep.

Cara. We should have done this six months ago.

Now I can sleep on our side again.

I'd say this is already a win, but if it will store away like I hope it does, then it's a really big win.

This is the part I'm not convinced on.

In our normal routine, we throw the sheet in this cabinet and the blanket in this cabinet. Normally, the fitted sheet goes in the cabinet as well, but I'm hoping that we can just keep it on the.

Mattress so getting out of the way.

Whoa, it's working. Boom. Sheet is still on. Looks a little ugly. So then we'll just take this to decorate a little bit. You on board for this, Kara? Sure. So.

This is one seating option.

I don't hate this.

Okay, I'll take that. All right, now set the table up like we're gonna, like, work. Okay. I feel like going up here with it.

Okay. Still gonna work, is it? Yeah, I think it adds stability to the table. Yeah, it looks a little silly, but I think it's gonna make our lives a lot more comfortable. And since we're the only two people that live in here 95% of the time, this is actually really nice.

It's nice to have a comfortable backrest that isn't this. Because typically, if I want to lean back, it's either on the window or on this straight up wall. And so I like having a comfy place to lounge.

We. We won't really know how this works out until a couple weeks from now when we've had some time to actually live with it. So if you're still seeing a few videos from now, things are going well. If you. If not, we've donated it to a homeless shelter or something.

Project number two, you as hot as.

I AM it's warm.

I love our heater.

It's still kind of annoying.

So this ended up being one of the biggest adjustments to van life for us. We camped off the grid a ton last year, whether it be in Walmart parking lots or BLM lands or friends driveways, all places without proper dump stations. And we do drink a lot of coffee, and we're pretty intentional about staying hydrated throughout the day. Between the two of us, we would fill up our urine tank in like, a day, which was super annoying, when we would be somewhere beautiful camping off the grid, and we would literally have to leave to find a place to dump our urine. I even had to carry it into some gas station and dump it in the toilet and flush it just so we could use our toilet. I just felt so trapped all the time. It got very old very quickly. But Nate has come up with a solution for this, and I'm feeling a lot more confident about this plan than about that one. Hey, it's going to be so great. I'm so excited.

All right, to work we go.

So if I've measured correctly, I should be able to fit this 20 gallon tank underneath the toilet and reroute the liquids underneath the van, increasing our urine capacity by 10x, which will allow us to stay off the grid for well over a week. And I figured while I'm underneath the van redoing the plumbing, we might as well increase the capacity of the gray water tank that sits under the sink to 15 gallons. When I was planning this little construction project, I did not realize it was going to be the coldest week in Tennessee in the last 10 years. It. It never snows like this here. Hey, Siri, what's The temperature?

It's 28 degrees outside.

This is the warmest it's going to be today, and today is the warmest day of the week.

Oh, man.

Sweet. That's.

It's gonna hold a lot of pee, which is good as long as it fits.

Oh, I like the shape of this one. It was just a little too wide to fit underneath the toilet. So this is the one that's going underneath the sink.

So we're going to start with the gray water tank that's underneath the sink, because I think this one's going to be the easiest. The first thing we have to do is take this old five gallon one out.

But, yeah, I think I'm going to need some help.

Should I go?

Wait. Say my name. Say my name.

You're me in my video.

Okay. I'm hot.

You look so Cute.

Have a good workout, girls.

Wow. That's a workout. I've lived here my entire life, and that is the first time I have ever shoveled snow in Tennessee. In 30 years, I can only remember seeing this much snow one other time.

There's 4 inches of fresh snow on top of 2 inches of ice, so it's pretty much impossible to get all the way down to the driveway. At least with this shovel.

Are you gonna help me change the water tanks under the van? Yeah. Okay.

Uncle Nate will tell you what to do.

We have the gray water sink on this side, so you can just start by crawling under there.

Yeah. Perfect. This is my helper for today. We've got to change out this tank right here.

Right there?

Yeah. All the way under the van.

Are you building a snow cone?

Nope.

What are you building? I found a snowman. It's a snowman.

Allie may have taken a nibble of a snowman's nose.

Never seen this technique for building a snowman. Very precise. Ancient Tennessee tradition.

It's been passed down for generation.

You want this one? Here. You can use this one. And I'll use the holy spoon.

You want to give him a new name?

Oh, this is going to work.

Snow lady.

Snow lady.

Yeah.

All right. It's snowing again. And I've enlisted the help of. Oh, gosh, my dad. All right. My goodness.

We're attempting to make the first cut. And by we, I mean he.

Instilling confidence.

I gave it, like, a 50. 50 chance of spewing water all over you. Well, that's a good thing.

Well, it came out easy.

I don't know, nate.

It's all the way to that joint. I think you would have a greater risk of ending up with no gray water storage if we rigged it up here, and you got 500 miles down the road and it fell off.

How's it going?

I have bad news.

What? It's not gonna work. Why? Does something break?

No, it's just not gonna fit. Which is good as long as it fits. Which is good as long as it fits. The.

The p. Tank or the both.

We're just not.

Well, that's a bummer. That was one of those plans that worked on paper, but.

We maybe could have gotten it wedged up in there. But in the long run, I think it just would have caused more harm than good. So we ended up putting the old tank back in.

It's rain. Really not that big of a deal. I think I'd gotten my hopes up, but we survived six months in the van. The way that it is now. So we'll just, we'll survive another six months and it's really not a big price to pay to have a tiny home on wheels that's going to allow us to go to all 50 states.

Still nothing.

Well, I was really hoping to be able to mark at least one more thing off this list before we end at this video, but the two devices that I'm hoping are going to fix our Internet issues were supposed to come in the mail three days ago and still haven't arrived.

It is starting to melt. It happens quickly in Tennessee.

So we said that we would share more details around our 50 states goal. And we've decided that we're not going to revisit the states that we've already made videos in on this channel. So that includes all the states that we drove to in the van and then a few more states before that.

So as it stands now, we have visited 20 of the 50 states, which means that over the next few months, our goal is to visit the remaining 30. But the plan isn't to highlight all the top things to do in every state that would be impossible during a pandemic. Instead, our goal is going to be to find one unique thing. Unique story, unique accommodation, unique adventure, one specific thing to highlight in each state. I don't think you're going to see a big change in our content. It's pretty much the type of videos that we've already been filming. We're just going to force ourselves to do it in a different state every week just to add some extra challenge during the pandemic, because why not?

Why do we love challenges so much? I'm not gonna lie. When I looked at a map of the states that we hadn't been to yet, I questioned if this was something we really wanted to do.

Let's just say some of these states would not be at the top of our US bucket list.

But then we realized the best part about our 100 country goal was it forced us to visit countries that were never really on our radar. And because of that, we discovered some of our favorite favorite places in the world, like Ukraine, for example.

We never would have gone to Ukraine if goal wasn't to visit 100 countries.

And it's epic.

Bhutan, Vanuatu. There's not a single country that we wouldn't go back to because we found something that we enjoyed in every single country. And I have no doubt it's going to be the same with each state.

In the U.S. but we're going to need your help on this.

There's a link in the description below. If you have an idea for the one unique thing that we should highlight and your state, click on that link, fill out the form, and let us know what our video should be about in your state. That would really help me out because I spent hours every single week researching for our videos. So you could save me a lot of time and make sure that your state gets highlighted correctly.

We want to do stuff that's not already all over the Internet. We want unique, cool stories, and we're.

Putting that on you.

It's going to be great.

All right. Next week, we are going to be in our first of the remaining 30 states. I'm just super excited to have a goal again. Yeah. I feel like we've been very directionless for a while now, and I like being. I like knowing that we're striving towards something. Yeah.

I can't really see anything so bright. I don't think I can talk like this. All right, so we made a list of all the things that annoyed us about living the van. It's so bright.

Look this way, then.

Which way? This way.

Is that better?

I'm crying. Don't throw it.

Do it under.

Don't knock the camera.

Don't do that. Ready? Don't do. No, no, no. Don't make that face. Ready?

Okay.

I'm throwing you away.

Okay.

Knew that was gonna add.

How's it taste?

Great.

Mickey, shake. No. Yeah.

Snow lady. I hold it. You gonna hold her hand?

Oh. Oh.

Xana broke her arm off.

So cute.

Close.

Kick it. Cold.

Yeah.

I'm cold. There you go. Just use your legs. Oh, yeah. It's like a snow dolphin. Snow mermaid.

Snow whale.

Bubble guppy. You changing out a water tank?

Are you gonna use a screwdriver? No, no screwdrivers.

Probably a hammer. Oh, that's too big.

Oh.

What. What's little enough? The little one.

Okay. What does the hammer do?

Bam, bam, bam, bam.

I'd say try not to do that, but it looks pretty.

Pretty solid.