Intro: About Us

Hi there! A lot of people who take the time to read this post might know me from my first blog that I kept over on www.jesschizukmusic.com. My name is Jess, and since 2018 my boyfriend Greg and I have been full-time van lifers. We originally moved into our first van in order to pursue national touring as an acoustic Americana duo The Rightly So. Between 2018 and 2020 I booked us five months-long national tours that took us to over 30 states, performing over 200 shows and living on the road entirely all the while. If you’re interested in that part of the story, my old blog goes into a great amount of detail on our previous adventures.

Here on Go There Free, I’m excited to start sharing the next chapter of our nomadic life.

I fell very quickly in love with the on-the-road lifestyle not long after we moved into our first van. Our 1995 GMC Vandura box van was a steadfast and loyal companion to both me and Greg for years. I originally bought it on eBay in 2017 from an older couple in Ohio, who took what was originally a Verizon work truck and converted it into a weekend camper. From there, we made all kinds of modifications to make it an RV suitable for full-time use - and we were still modifying it up until the last month we had it. We moved in the second week of January in 2018, and slept in it almost every night for the three years we lived in it.

Our old van, somewhere in the Sonoran desert.

The Vandura changed my life in every conceivable way. It took me to places I would've otherwise never dreamed of, opened doors in my life I didn’t know existed, and brought out a resilient, strong-willed side of me in a way I had never utilized before. Until early this year, I was mostly of the position that I would never sell it. I had imagined giving it to hypothetical children at one time - that’s how attached I was (and some days still am) to that old bucket of bolts.

But in the last year, everything changed, and very quickly. All of our 2020 tour dates and 2021 plans were dashed in a matter of weeks into the pandemic. We spent a long time holed up in Buffalo waiting for the tide to change - all the while saving money and re-evaluating what our long-term goals were. For fans of the music side of this venture - the long and short of it is that I was getting VERY burned out from the way we were touring. For as many highs as we had, they were accompanied by lows of the same intensity, and as I alone was handling all of the booking, scheduling, routing, accounting, budgeting, and van-repairing - it’s not really shocking that when the universe forced an extended break on me, I eventually came to the conclusion that I needed it, and badly. While I don’t ever intend to stop playing music altogether, I know the number of future shows - along with their location and quality - is extraordinarily different than what I wanted two years ago.

The other thing that happened was the explosion of the RV market. The pandemic made RV travel more appealing than ever, and as a result, used RV prices shot absolutely through the roof in a very short time. I didn’t think we would fall into the category of “owners of a commodity” what with our 26-year-old vehicle with an oil leak and an undercarriage that has definitely seen the worst of some rust belt winters. But then we talked to some other RV-dwelling friends of ours, who sold their van to buy a new rig. When we found out what their 1980-something van sold for, everything fell into place in a matter of minutes.

Our needs are changing, and we don’t want to stop living on the road any time soon. Now is the time to sell our first van and find something newer. Bigger. Better. And quickly, before the door on this opportunity closes.

We left Buffalo in January in our van to go camp in the desert for a few months as far away from most people as we could get. About 2 weeks into that trip, I started planning the sale of the van and started looking for our next vehicle. The van never came back to Buffalo - we completed the entire process on the road.

That process was incredibly frustrating for a number of reasons. I have a post over here that talks about the process of choosing a vehicle to convert, and why we ended up with our bus, but that wasn’t the real challenge. It was all an emotional struggle for me. Things went very quickly from “I love the life I’ve built for us” to “let’s change literally everything about what we’re doing immediately”. That was (and is) still the hardest part. Some days I wake up and think that I’m in the van for a second before reality sets in. I do miss the way things were - but that doesn’t mean I’m not more excited for the way things are.

This is the main image I used in all the van’s For Sale listings. Probably the best picture I ever took of the interior.

After we purchased our bus, we listed the van as officially for sale. I had my first serious inquiry in less than two hours and my first offer in less than four days. Overall, I would guess that I had over 100 inquiries on it, at least six or seven offers (all within a few thousand of our asking price), and I probably spoke on the phone or in-depth via email to thirty people. The online vanlife community really loved our little van - and I admit we did a bang-up job of staging it and explaining all its quirky benefits.

But in all honesty, I could not have asked for a better buyer than the one we ended up with. I sold the van to a young airman who is currently stationed in Qatar. He’s 23 - the same age I was when I moved into the van full-time. The day after he was deployed, his apartment burned to the ground. When he returns home to Georgia in July, he was going to have nothing at all to come home to. So he decided he’d buy a van so that he could travel and see the country once he’s finished with his service. What a noble and deserving new life for our little Vandura.

So, Greg and I moved all of our stuff out of our old van and piled it into our empty bus. We then set ourselves up to drive from Arizona to Georgia to drop the van off to a friend of the buyers’ who is holding the van for him until he gets home. Now, keep in mind in the three years we owned the van I drove it about a dozen times. I took it through Atlanta rush hour traffic once and said “I am never doing that again”, and meant it. But with two vehicles to move, I clearly had to take one of them. Since the van was 5 feet shorter than the new bus, that’s what I decided I would drive. And you know what? Once we got on the highway it was like I had been driving it the entire time we had owned it. It felt absolutely natural. Greg and I had walkie-talkies we used like CB radios, and I blasted Billy Joel and Jim Croce songs through the van’s halfway blown-out speakers for three straight days.

The handoff of the van was seamless - the friend of the buyer was actually a superior officer of his, who showed up in full uniform. With little knowledge of vans himself and no questions for me, I handed him the keys and we took the plates off, and we were done in a matter of minutes.

I cried like an absolute baby in the Walmart parking lot that we met him in after we pulled away. It broke my heart more than a little - that vehicle was the literal vessel that allowed me to transform my life into something I'm proud of, and I owe so much of it to the van alone. A million good days, a million bad ones, a million lessons, and a million miles. It’s so very hard to leave that all behind all in a single moment. I know it seems silly, and I know we made the right move for our future selves - but what I wouldn’t give to have been able to do this whole process while still having my trusty van to crawl into at night.

From there, things got very real very fast. Georgia to Buffalo is too long of a drive to do comfortably in one day, so we spent one night in a rest stop in Kentucky in the bus. I bought backpacking sleeping pads on Amazon for the occasion, and I hung up our old sheets on the windows. Our poor dog Piper has never been more confused, running up and down the middle of the bus and crying because everything was strange and different - she does even worse than I do with change, but not by much. It was cold and foreign and noisy at the rest stop - but it was fun to think about what our next first night in the bus would look like compared to that one unforgiving evening.

This is where we parked and slept our first night in the bus. It was in the 30’s out overnight.

The next day we brought the bus home to Buffalo, and that’s where our conversion story begins, which also means I can switch over to talking about the build process and present-day living, which also means this post should end here.

I wasn’t sure I was going to put any personal posts on this blog at all when I started setting the website up. But then one day I was looking for electrical wiring diagrams, and I came across the blog of a couple who had done a skoolie conversion. Their electrical system was so thorough and in-depth - by far the best and most useful one I came across. They clearly put so much time and effort into what looked like a gorgeous build. But I clicked into their personal posts on their blog, and found the heartbreaking conclusion post - their engine had lost a lot of oil on their maiden voyage after their conversion was done, requiring over $10k worth of engine repairs, which they did not have. They moved to a new city instead of traveling, and never got to take their bus anywhere.

That really stuck with me. Not everyone who sets out to do this gets to the finish line. Some people get all the way to the end and still don’t get to finally hit the road. But we’re fortunate enough to have a different ending to our story. And I think - maybe a little selfishly, deep down - that I want others who are thinking about embarking on this journey to be able to read about our process, our struggles, our victories - and know that even when it seems impossible, it isn’t, and that with a lot of planning and hard work, that the conversion process can be just the beginning to a million more adventures.

So thanks for following along with us, no matter why you’re here. I’m excited to have you along for the ride.

The first day of the rest of our lives - day 1 with the bus.