When I first discovered vanlife, my favorite types of YouTube videos were build videos and van tours. I’ve done lots of build videos and after a year and a half of owning the van I decided to finally do a tour video.

I intentionally titled this video “Van Tour 1.0” because I know someday there will be a “2.0” and to be honest even calling it 1.0 might have been optimistic. The reality is, I’m always working on the van. I’m always dreaming about things to add and things to improve. I do that in my “sticks and bricks” home and I do it in my van, too. As a writer I struggle with creating stories that don’t have endings yet. If the van were to self-destruct tomorrow, writing that story would be very easy. Documenting a build that feels eternally fluid is much more difficult. Additionally my van build is young, which made filming a van tour now feel like a teenager writing his autobiography. I didn’t want to film a van tour until the van was “done” and I have to put that word in air quotes because I don’t know that vans are ever “done”.

Perhaps “1.0” represents a different line in the sand; not that the fan is done, but that it is functional. As rough as some parts of the van are, the van is functional. Earlier this year I drove the van over 1,000 miles to West Virginia. I slept in the van for the entire trip. Things worked. The solar panel charged my battery system. The refrigerator kept my food and drinks cold. Nothing catastrophic failed. Everything just worked, and so if there’s any significance to “1.0”, it’s that.

Shortly after my wife and I first moved in together back in the early 90s, I purchased my very first camcorder. Long before we all had cell phones, this was how we made videos. My wife and I, along with a roommate, lived in a mobile home parked near the college we were attending. One day I decided to record a video of the mobile home. This was back when MTV’s Cribs was popular so I was probably emulating that. The video itself is pretty mundane, just clips I recorded while walking through the house and our bedrooms, but today I love watching it. It captures so much, not just the mobile home, but who I was in 1994. There are shots of my clothes, of the posters I had hanging on the walls and the stack of both CDs and cassettes I had next to my stereo system. It’s a cool little time capsule and I’m so glad I have it. I suspect someday I’ll feel the same way about this van tour video.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that cameras and eyeballs see things very differently. Our eyes are tied to our brains (and hearts) which affects what we see. Our brains automatically filter out things that aren’t important and zone in on what we’re focused on. It’s a great system! Cameras are different. Take a picture or video of a beautiful sunset and the sunset will have the same precedence as the other people in the shot, the trash in the sky, and the bird poop on the ground. Obviously those things can be avoided through photography skills and editing software, but my point is that what the cameras sees is different than what we see. While editing this video all I saw were the van’s flaws. Every screw that didn’t line up, every piece of wood that’s not exactly the right size, and every flaw in the pain shows up. When I’m inside the van my brain is so focused on what’s happening that I must tune those things out, but on the screen, the pixels don’t lie. She’s not the fanciest ship on the sea, but she’s mine.

I hope you enjoy the tour of the van. Just don’t be surprised when it looks different the next time you see it!