Typically, this kind of peripatetic lifestyle involves remote work, planning, saving and a fair bit of physical and mental labour. “Uncertainty is the most difficult part,” Geethanandan says. “You never know what will go wrong or which part of the van will start leaking, but it teaches you things that nothing else in life could. You’ll unlearn a lot about the world. The road became my university.”
At 27, Shruthi Lapp, who was born in India and grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, had never been camping, hiking or spent much time outdoors. “The general expectation in Indian culture is a high-performing career, an affluent lifestyle, marriage and kids. I’m the only woman in my family who knows how to swim,” she says. For Lapp, deciding to live out of a van was a full 180 and meant having to unlearn expectations, even around something as small as exposing her skin to the sun and letting it darken. Now travelling in a 35-year-old Volkswagen van with her husband, she is aware of how radical her choice can seem to her family. “I sense a combination of disapproval, confusion and the opinion that I’m not living up to my full potential,” she admits. “So many of our parents grew up without the material and social comforts they envisioned when leaving their birth country. Logically, the van life might feel like a huge leap back for my parents. But ultimately, the freedom to do whatever I wish to with my time was the goal.”
