I Tried Van Life for 3 Months — It's Not What Instagram Showed
We did three months of van life in 2024. Not full-time, not the dream — just a three-month trial to see if we wanted the lifestyle. The honest report:
What worked
Waking up next to the lake. Not having to commute. Cooking outside. The dogs being with us all day instead of in a daycare. The first-30-seconds-of-every-morning of stepping out into the air at a new spot.
Those moments are real. They're as good as Instagram makes them look. They're maybe 12% of the experience.
What didn't work
Showers. We'd planned for showers at planet fitness ($25/month) and it worked sort of, but planet fitness locations are clustered in cities, and we were chasing public lands. Three days between showers became normal. Five days happened. We never got used to it.
Internet. We had a cellular hotspot and a roof-mounted antenna. Some days it was fine, some days we drove 40 miles to find usable coverage. If you have any kind of work that requires real-time internet, you will spend a lot of time chasing service.
Sleep. The bed was comfortable. The street wasn't. Stealth-camping in cities means waking up to truck noise, dog walkers, occasional cops checking on us. Even 'good' overnight spots had something — a 4am garbage truck, a sprinkler, a bar that didn't close until 2am. We slept worse on average than we did at home.
Cooking. The setup worked but the cleanup is the killer. There's no dishwasher. Dish water has to go somewhere (gray tank, or a bucket dumped at a station). After six weeks the cooking enthusiasm dropped to maybe 30% of what it was at week one. We ate out more, which broke the budget more than anywhere else.
The relationship
This is the part nobody writes about honestly.
We were together 24/7. Two people in 80 square feet of space. Half the days were great. A handful were tense. A few were genuinely bad — the kind of fight that wouldn't have happened in a house with two rooms to retreat to. By the end of three months, we'd developed a 'separate spaces' protocol where one of us would walk for an hour while the other had the van, and that helped a lot. But the fact that we needed it tells you something about what those 80 square feet feel like over time.
If you're going to try van life with a partner, talk about how you'll handle conflict in advance. The 'one of us walks' protocol was the single most important thing we did.
The cost
We spent about $4,800 over three months including gas ($1,200), groceries ($1,500), eating out ($800), campgrounds when we needed full hookups ($300), the gym membership for showers ($75), insurance pro-rated for the van ($250), and the van itself ($0 in our case — we already owned it).
$1,600/month is cheaper than rent in most cities. It's not cheaper than rent in suburbia. The van-life-saves-you-money math depends entirely on where you'd otherwise be living.
What we'd do differently next time
Build in a real shower. Even a $300 outdoor shower bag setup. The 'find a planet fitness' plan never worked the way we wanted.
Sleep in better spots. We optimized for free, scenic, or close-to-trailhead. We should have optimized for quiet. A $30 campground night that lets you actually sleep is worth two $0 stealth nights that you don't.
Plan more 'boring' nights. The pressure to make every night Instagram-worthy was real and self-imposed and exhausting. The best nights of the trip were the boring ones at well-reviewed campgrounds.
Three months instead of six. We wanted to try six. We did three and decided we wouldn't have wanted six. Three was enough to know.
Would we recommend it
For a trip — yes. Three weeks to three months is a real life experience that we wouldn't trade.
Full-time — only with reservations. The Instagram version is selectively edited. The real version requires showers, space from your partner, and a relationship with your phone hotspot that we never quite achieved.
We're keeping the van. We're using it 4-6 weekends a year. That's the right dosage for us. Other people will be different — but if you're considering full-time, do a 3-month trial first. The trial will tell you most of what you need to know.
Membership Harvest Hosts — Free overnight RV stays at 4,000+ wineries, farms, and breweries — pays for itself in ~4 nights. Build power EcoFlow Delta Pro — The 3.6kWh power station that's replacing inverters and battery banks in modern van builds.