Obstacles & Fears | Solo VanLife. Ep.4

Where do I even begin, I’ve gotta take myself back a little to this moment and the moments to come that I will be sharing with you, the upcoming blog posts.

Before (& a little throughout my build process) I was ALSO going through a major life shift, I was fighting myself away from a very abusive relationship, picking up my pieces, learning to love again while also loving myself. 

So all that to say, when the Van was done and I knew I was beginning my journey across the country… ALL the “What if’s” were coming up. So much so that I didn’t know until a week leading up to that date if I was even gonna go.

Nonetheless, I kept moving on each day. I did something small to prepare for my departure and remembered that I’d never let fear be the reason to stop me. So, to gain more confidence on the road by myself, I went to the mountains with another gal pal that lived in a van.

NOW, this is where it gets interesting and what I have learnt when it comes to trusting people to help you build out a van. MAKE SURE they are legit, that you sign a contract of some kind to save yourself – I know, very different vibe from how I started this blog entry but this is what happened…

I used a local company here in Alberta to do my electrical system, or at least guide me through the process. I had found what I thought were the correct batteries based on likeminded research which were over $1000 and through their experience and knowledge they gave me the green light to buy those particular ones. In the grand scheme of things, they were somewhat right but NOT for someone who would be living off grid full time. So as you will see in this video, everything died because my batteries were DRAINED, though at the time I thought everything was broken.

My $2000 Fridge stopped working and gave me an error message, my water pump stopped working and my voltage was 11.5 which is basically zero. I wasn’t going to let this stop me for one weekend but when your pup eats frozen food and you had a full fridge of things, this couldn’t go on much longer.

So, I enjoyed my weekend and still found time to be so damn grateful that this was still once a dream and I was now living it. I hope you take a moment to watch this video as I lived each day one by one until the day came that I would be traveling across the country.