Hello, so this is what we do and why.

 

Dear English speaking friends, J1s, hosts, surfers, house owners and travelers!

 

I will do my best and try to write at least once per month a summary about our adventure in English language. Thank you for your interest and support! Many of you told me that the Facebook translator is not 100% correct and sometimes you get lost. Well no worries, it probably doesn’t make sense anyway!

Hop on to the little introduction:

My name is Andrea and I am big big dreamer. I always wanted to travel around the world in RV and over the past few years I watched hundreds of YouTube videos about van conversion.

I visited United States couples times thanks to my dad and via exchange programs. I fell in love with the nature, especially mountains and always met super kind, generous and interesting people. Although I spent 4 months in US in summer 2016, it didn’t felt like enough time. 

So I made a plan – to make the road trip happen. To travel around US for a year, take it slow, to stay where-ever I like it. To travel the Rocky Mountains, explore lakes, beaches, waterfalls. To see as many gorgeous sunrises and sunsets as possible.

At that time I haven’t even had a driving license yet, but hey, you know what they say, nobody´s perfect.

In fall I arrived home to Czech Republic and was catching up with my friends. One evening in a pub, I was telling them about my summer in New Hampshire and the crazy plans for the next year. Maybe crazy, but dead serious. 

His name is Václav and good luck with pronouncing it. He was a friend of a friend, we met for the first time and just happened to sit at the same table in that pub.

It went somehow like this:

„So I am going to buy a van and ... drive, travel, mountains, humming birds, sunsets, blah blah blah… It is just I don´t have driving licence yet.“

„Hey, can I go with you? I can drive. “

And so he did.

After three months, in February 2017, we met at the airport in Prague and flew to New Jersey.

All righty, we have met couple time in between, but no more than 5 times, I would say. And twice of that was on Christmas market over hot-drunken-appleish drink.

Two As to your Qs:

1. Are you a couple? 

Nope. We just share the same wanderlust! We are more like a team. 

2. How do you finance your traveling?

The best we can! We both sold or rented everything we could before leaving. That and savings gave us budget for the beginning, especially for buying the car and the insurance. The point is to cut out expenses as much as possible. That is the great thing about traveling in a van – you already have a roof over your head and that is a big time saving while traveling. We also got into couchsurfing and housesitting. On our “to do” list is still couple ideas, such as working on farms as volunteers in exchange for bed/dinner/shower.

It costs money, but we don’t really have concrete idea how much - ´cause who would waste precious WiFi or data on checking back accounts!

Sure, I would love to make money online by blogging, but I realized that, I want to do it for fun, with the drive to tell a story and enjoy the process - because I laugh my ass off while writing in Starbucks, ask Vašek. So we write our story as diary for us, as a book for our families and friends, anyone who is interested and so we create photo albums of cool moments and places. But of course, if you feel like sharing our page couple thousand times, thanks! :D

Let’s wrap it up with third question in a short dialogue I had on the street yesterday.

I met little girl on the street and she was curious who am I, because she knew I am not the dog, nor the house owner we currently sit .

„Where are you from?“ she asked me, and heard about Europe for the first time.

„What are you doing here?“

„You mean in United States? We travel.“ I replied.

„Oh… but… why?“

„Well it´s fun.“

She gave me really intense look. 

„Okay... because I don´t want to work like them grownups.“

Do you have any brutally honest questions as well? 
Or have I missed anything basic about how it all started?

Next time, I would like to sum up what we did the first month and what it took to be able to start the van life.

Let me know if you understand and have a great day!