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How We Met
Hillary and I (Andrew) first met way back in the summer of 2002 on a mission trip to Honduras. Well, technically we met on the way to Honduras in the Miami airport when Hillary invited me to come play cards. It is a bit poetic that it all started with travel and games, because to this day those are two of our favorite things. We both attended Georgia Tech, majoring in Mechanical Engineering (Andrew) and Biomedical Engineering (Hillary).
We continued to travel while in college. I went on a study abroad to Shanghai, China in the summer of 2005 for two months. This was my first experience living in another country and facing the challenge of not being able to speak the language. The next summer Hillary and I went on another study abroad to Metz, France, where we traveled every weekend all over Western Europe for three months. This was our first real endurance test on our compatibility as travel companions. We learned that we are actually quite compatible even though we have our differences.
Hillary is a doer and a planner; I like to say that she doesn’t take vacations, she takes trips, because vacation implies that you are resting and relaxing. I don’t remember any other students on our study abroad trip who didn’t take a single weekend off from traveling. To top that off, we extended the trip on the front and back to stay to the maximum 90 days that our student Visas allowed. Her travel style is great for me, because I am also a very active person, I love hiking, mountain biking, exploring cities, but I’d rather leave the planning to someone else. I do it occasionally, because even Hillary needs breaks sometimes.
After seven years of dating, I finally got the message that it was time to marry this woman. In 2009 we were married at a small botanical garden outside of Newnan, GA, where Hillary is from, and about 45 minutes from where I was raised. For our honeymoon we spent ten days traveling around Costa Rica; it’s a pretty spectacular place, let us know if you need recommendations on what to do.
Our Dog Dexter
There’s another very important companion in the van with us that hasn’t been mentioned so far in this story. Hillary likes to remind me that she asked me for a dog for ten years before we adopted Dexter. I always knew I wanted a dog eventually, but I wanted to make sure it was the right time. First we were in college, and a dog can’t live in dorm rooms. Next, I was in graduate school working on my doctorate. In the first few years I was in the lab or in classes roughly 50-60 hours a week. This didn’t seem like the right environment for bringing a dog into our life. Eventually I finished all the classes required for my doctorate, and had more ability to work from home. We decided in 2013 it was finally the right time to bring a dog into our lives. We went to the Atlanta Humane Society and brought home the cutest puppy we had ever seen!
This was a major adjustment to our lifestyle. If you’ve never had a puppy before, they are hard work. And not all puppies are created equal in terms of energy levels. People still ask us regularly if Dexter is a puppy; when we tell them that he is six they are always shocked. I remember one day when he was under a year old we took him on a seven mile run and then to the dog park afterwards where he ran around with dogs for another hour or so. We took him home thinking he would be exhausted, but he was still bouncing off the walls when we got home.
If you’ve owned a working dog breed or other high energy pooch, you might recognize the mistake we were making. We were providing tons of physical exercise for Dexter, but what he was missing was mental exercise. We enrolled in a dog training class, and our trainer quickly recognized the issue. We started teaching Dexter how to do tricks, we bought puzzle toys that required him to perform various tasks to get treats out of the toys, and we started feeding him from a feeder ball, which basically dispenses food as he rolls it around the room. Wow! The difference was night and day. Not only was Dexter’s energy level more manageable, it didn’t require running seven miles so us humans were not exhausted everyday.
When we moved to Charlotte after I finished my PhD and started a new job, we found a new trainer named Emily Greene. If you live in Charlotte, we can’t recommend her enough, she is awesome and Dexter loves her! She now jointly runs Free Will Animal Training with Amy Blom. Look them up if you need dog training, you won’t regret it. Emily got us into Dog Agility, which is basically an obstacle course run for dogs. There are some videos of Dexter doing it on his Instagram page, you can check it out if you are interested. It is one of his favorite activities, and we try to incorporate it on the road when we see obstacles that will work. It’s not as hard as you would think, we find fallen trees or fences to be great impromptu agility exercises.
How We Decided to Live in a Van
My husband, Andrew, and I became full time vanlifers in January 2019. We plan to travel for the next 1-2 years; we don’t really have a defined end date, we have basically told each other that we will do this until we feel we are finished. We spent about 10 months converting an empty RAM ProMaster 1500 cargo van into a campervan and reducing our possessions to accommodate going from 2400 square feet of living space to 64 square feet of living space. You can learn how we converted our campervan on our Van Build page.
After college I spent 10 years in the corporate world at various companies with various jobs. None of them seemed to be a great fit for me. I started getting more and more into yoga, which helped me immensely not just with my strength and flexibility, but also with managing and reducing stress. I started doing yoga when I was seventeen, but I consistently started practicing when we moved to Charlotte in 2013. I developed and improved my practice over the next four and a half years that we lived in Charlotte, and along the way decided that I wanted to become a yoga teacher and quit my corporate job. I traveled to Barcelona to attend Yogabody’s Yoga Teachers College. Shortly after finishing my training, I quit my job and started my yoga teaching career. If you are interested in learning more, my website is Fit for this Journey and I’m on Instagram as @fitforthisjourney.
I was transitioning to teaching yoga full time for about a year when we decided to build a van. Even before the van idea, we were already in a lifestyle change period where we were letting go of preconceived ideas about what our life was going to look like. My salary alone was going to cut down by probably 80% for several years so we started to make some adjustments. Shortly after I achieved my teaching certification from Yoga Teachers College, I was talking with my husband one day and he just said, “I want to do the van thing.” The idea originally came from our friends Jacob and Stephanie (Puzzle Vans), who had taken a year off and traveled in a self-converted Sprinter campervan. Since we were already preparing a lifestyle change, it made the decision simple. I immediately responded, “I was already going to quit my job to teach yoga full time, I’m 100% game to do the van thing.” Within 2 weeks, we were the proud owners of an empty cargo van! (along with a little bit of thinking, “what have we done?”)
The hard part was letting go of possessions, expectations, and fears around what we thought our life was going to be like. We had spent years setting up a great life; we enjoyed the lifestyle and ability to travel that our jobs afforded us, but we weren’t enjoying our worklife. I do not look back on this period with regret; it helped us grow and understand ourselves better, and it lead us to the decision of buying a van and taking this amazing journey. We love the new adventures and experiences that every day brings. Traveling is one of our passions and to get to do it everyday is a real privilege. Vanlife isn’t all sunshine and roses, there are hard and frustrating days where nothing goes the way you plan. However, sometimes the difficult experiences in life help shape us, and allow us to better appreciate all of the amazing experiences that this lifestyle gives.
