I sat in the bathroom staring at the blue cross sign on the pregnancy test, as expletives leaked out of my mouth in a whisper. Disbelief sat around me like the 4 a.m. dew outside our window.
We always wanted kids. Traveling in a camper van was our “last hurrah” before pivoting toward parenthood. But that wasn’t supposed to happen yet.
The shock bubbled away, and excitement found home in my body. I smiled and covered my hand over my mouth.
We don’t always get to choose our own timelines. I rushed to my husband, John, to wake him up.
This was our one last adventure before having kids
My husband and I were both busy with the 9-5-and-working-odd-jobs hustle. We lived in a large house that we would someday fill with kids. There was a whole world we wanted to see before we tied ourselves down with the responsibility of child rearing. We chose to say goodbye to the life we were told to settle for in pursuit of a life we wanted to celebrate.
Partially on a whim, mostly on adrenaline, we sold most of our belongings and built a 1996 Chevy Express conversion van into a tiny house.
We wanted to explore the country coast to coast before we took on the role of parents. We also wanted to see what our options were for where we would settle down. Do we want to raise kids in a city? In the middle of nowhere? East coast? West coast? Mountain town? Rural Midwest?
We buckled ourselves into our van with our pups and hit the road to rediscover ourselves without the chains of our previous life and to find where we’d like to replace our anchor.
Courtesy of Jayme Serbell
From April 2017 to April 2019, we discovered the magnificent, hidden corners of almost every state. We camped in humid Florida, snowy Vermont, busy California, and sleepy Wyoming.
Every pocket we investigated had something remarkable that ignited our excitement and something tricky that made us second-guess a home there. Each area brought us one step closer to our end goal.
Everything shifted overnight
In March 2019, we were back in St. Louis to visit our family. My period had been irregular ever since I had experimented with hormonal birth control, so we could never quite pin down my cycle.
We were planning our next departure, and I took a pregnancy test to prove I was not pregnant, for our own peace of mind.
This wasn’t the timeline we had planned, but one thing living in a van had taught us was to find comfort in the unexpected. Flexibility is one of your greatest tools when you travel full-time. You never know what obstacles are going to throw you off course.
Giddy with excitement, John chose to scrap our plans we had laid out for the rest of the year. We now needed to make our most important decision. Where do we want to have this baby?
Life made us decide which path we wanted to take next
Throughout our travels, we found ourselves returning to New Mexico. The warm sun, the dry air, the beautiful winters, and the towering mountains all took our breath away. It was diverse, eclectic, artistic, and inspiring. We joked it was like Colorado, but without any of the people. We both felt the call and picked up the phone.
Shortly after the positive pregnancy test, we lost the baby. Grief filled the van as we stared at the fork in the road.
We had to decide what we wanted now. Do we want to keep traveling? Or do we want to stay on this new path? The contemplation was minimal. The excitement and the loss had shown us what we wanted. We were ready to grow our family.
Trading in four wheels for four walls
We spent that summer exploring various properties. There was an unexpected grief in the search for a new residence. The van was our home. The road, our driveway. The wild, our backyard. Our identity was tied to the title “vanlifers”, which meant we were constantly moving and on the go.
But now we were settling down and growing roots.
We outgrew our lifestyle quicker than we had planned, but we unlocked a new and exciting chapter when we bought an off-grid home on 40 acres. We weren’t pumping the brakes on an adventurous life. We were just shifting gears.