My 3 Most Absurd Vanlife Moments

While Instagram is filled with photos of perfect, filtered versions of #Vanlife, those of us who have lived the lifestyle know that this often feels a bit misleading. Between the chaos of living in such tiny square footage, and the need to acquire new skills to perform what are otherwise mundane daily activities, it sure does take some adapting to.

The following are three of my most absurd moments in my van. The moments when I thought to myself, “what the f*** am I even doing with my life”.

However, I do want to preface this by saying that these moments are, oddly enough, the ones I look back on most fondly once they’re behind me.

While waking up with beachfront views or road-tripping to the mountains is what leads many people to this lifestyle, these aren’t usually the stories we laugh about around a campfire.

I don’t regret a single second of my experience living in a van, and I’m grateful to have lived through these moments so that I can now laugh at them!

Our very, very, very cold night in Calgary.

In December of 2021, my boyfriend, R, and I were driving across Canada in order to get to my new job on Vancouver Island. These two weeks were among the most eventful of my life, which so many incredible sights to take in along the drive.

When we hit Calgary, temperatures dropped to about -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit), with the sun making few appearances throughout the day. Our solar power levels had been severely depleted at this point, and we were lighting the bus with our battery-powered string lights and Christmas decorations every evening to avoid depleting it more.

We had equipped our van with a diesel heater, which is supposed to be the most efficient and effective way of heating a space, but had given us a few issues so far (I recount another heater-related misadventure below).

The good thing about the heater is that, once it’s running, it doesn’t take much power at all to heat our space. But it does use a significant amount of power just upon starting up — and this was an amount that we certainly did not have.

One night, we broke down in a parking lot in Calgary and had to spend a frigid (to say the least) night braving the elements. Without our heater. Yikes.

While we did sleep in our full snow gear, and basically our entire wardrobe underneath, we knew we had to find some source of heat to cling to.

Before bed, I suddenly remembered an old camping hack that a friend had told me about. We used our propane stove to boil hot water, and filled a few of our plastic bottles with it. We then tucked the bottles between our covers, shut our eyes, and tried to visualize that we were on a warm beach somewhere under the sun. And that’s how we made it through the night!

Almost burning down the van

Our not-so-trusty heater has the honour of being the main character in two of my craziest vanlife moments.

Flashback to the fall before our big departure in the van. After spending a few days installing the heater, I was incredibly proud of how far along we were in the van conversion process.

Our deadline for the build was fast approaching, and we were finally making good time. R and I decided to make a celebratory pasta dinner in the bus, which was now possible thanks to our handy heater making the space so cozy.

We cooked our pasta, set up our table, and enjoyed the gentle ticking of the heater warming up our little home. After a few minutes of eating, I looked up, squinting. My vision seemed oddly hazy, as if a thin white curtain had fallen over the space. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but every time I looked up my vision seemed to get hazier. R couldn’t tell that anything was different, so I thought I was just extra tired from all our work that day.

After a few more minutes of eating, I smelled it. A burning smell. R could smell it too. We both turned to each other, and it hit us at the same time: the heater.

We simultaneously jumped up to turn the heater off, and sprinted around to the back of the van to inspect the damage. The wood around the heater was singed and glowing red, but thankfully it hadn’t been on long enough to start a fire.

We later realized the stupidity of allowing our heater’s exhaust to be in such close proximity to a wooden floor. It’s quite embarrassing to think about how silly this mistake was, but I guess we live and learn! We were just thankful to have come out of the ordeal with our van unscathed.

Having my window smashed to bits by a child

One of my craziest, and proudest, Vanlife moments came after a 4-year-old child innocently threw a rock squarely into the middle of one of my van’s large windows.

The rock remained lodged inside the glass, with a web of infinite cracks appearing around it, making a mosaic of thousands of tiny shards on the verge of collapsing. My first reaction when I saw this was to almost laugh. Of course. Of course, this would happen. Of course, I would be sleeping with a gaping hole on the side of my tiny home. There just can’t be a dull moment here!

I reached out to friends for advice about fixing the window, and within an hour had a fellow vanlifer meet me at a nearby Home Depot to help me fit a new sheet of plexiglass where the old window was.

That very night, I was sleeping in my cozy van with all the windows intact.

And as I curled up in my bed and drifted off to sleep, I felt such a wave of pride wash over me. I was proud for two reasons. First of all, I realized what an incredible community I was part of. Here I was, living in a van out on my own, connected with a like-minded group of people who I knew would help me get through any situation. It’s truly one of the best parts of the lifestyle.

Second of all, it hit me how much I had grown emotionally as a person. I was essentially faced with sleeping without a window for an unknown period of time, and instead of panicking, I trusted that I would be able to figure it out eventually. This ability to roll with the punches does not come easily to me, and I was so proud of the trust I had in my abilities and resourcefulness.

Think you have what it takes to do Vanlife? Go for it — you’ll certainly have some stories to tell afterward!