Category: Vanlife

Bend, Oregon has Finally Lost its Mountain Town Charm

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

Tonight, I feel like a billionaire. Or, I guess, what I would do with a Billion dollars since I don’t have any aspirations to go to Mars. In this modern day, there doesn’t seem like any other realistic explanation to explain the feeling of freedom when camping on our public lands in the West. Tonight, we’ve parked our van in the exact same spot as the past few years in the Deschutes National Forest, just 10 minutes outside of Bend, Oregon. And just like the previous years, I sit here, staring off in to the distance, through the ponderosa pine forest, spaced …

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10th Cross Country Road Trip in 3 Years

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

On our recent vacation, my wife and I met an Australian couple from Perth, who were on a six-month trip around the world. They told us how much they enjoyed their road trip in the states from Georgia to Missouri, then over to New York. We got chatting about how similar the size of our two countries were. But it was the remoteness of the Australian cities that blew my mind. Perth’s nearest neighbor is Adelaide, nearly 1,300 miles away, which is the distance from San Diego to Dallas. They told us how rare it was for Aussies to ever …

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Video // Chasing Sun Part 4 in Oregon

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

We are back in the van again, pointing Hoagie west to head off on a month-long road trip through Oregon and Northern California. I signed up for the Downieville Mountain Bike race with some friends at the end of July, so it’s an excuse to extend the trip and see some incredible places we haven’t been to like Crater Lake and the Redwoods! Of course, stopping by some familiar places along the way. The trip was filled with so much fun, a lot of training, more work, but in the end, memories we’ll never forget! While in Oregon, we spent …

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First Winter Traveling in the Van // From Florida to Arizona

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

What started as an idea on a walk around our neighborhood in the historic winter of 2022/2023, thinking of ways to escape the snow, quickly snowballed into reality. That spring we sold our Tacoma, bought a van, and then spent the next 9 months building it out to prepare for as much travel as we could in 20224. Of course it wasn’t with out it’s challenges and frustrating moments when the build didn’t go quite as planned or the internet wasn’t what we needed it to be. But in the end, it was one hell of an exciting winter. Our …

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Best Options for Mobile Internet // Van Life & Remote Travel

Zachary Kenney1 Comment

The dream: Head down a dirt access road for 20 miles, find an epic campsite, be able to work remotely, and not need to leave for an entire week. The reality: Spend most of your time trying to find a place to stay that will be close to a town so that we can get good cell service to make sure we’re able to work.“Affordable” mobile internet has come a helluva long way from those little jet-pack wifi devices and relying on your cellphone’s hotspot to try and download an email, to now being able to connect to high speed …

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Endless Adventure Opportunities in Hood River, Oregon

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

I first visited Hood River 4 years ago on a road trip through Oregon with our friends during the summer of 2020, and it was such an eye opening experience. I had never seen anything like it. Hood River wasn’t a beach town, it wasn’t a mountain town, it wasn’t a populated city center, it was somewhere mixed in between all of them. A place that wind sport lovers flock to in droves during the warmer months of the calendar. Better still, on the outskirts of town, Hood River has that perfect Pacific Northwest mountain biking scene and volcano skiing. …

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Surviving a Heatwave in Mount Shasta, California

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

It’s easy to change a weekend plan to avoid rain, cold temperatures, or whatever the reason. It’s slightly more difficult when you plan a month of travel on the road, and an abnormal heat wave blankets Northern California for two weeks during our trip. During the peaking temperatures, rising over 110 degrees, we found ourselves in the town of Mount Shasta with plans to camp that were quickly dashed and required immediate change of plans. Needless to say, working inside of a van that felt like an oven was a recipe for disaster, but we made the most of it …

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Long-Term Travel and Mental Health // #VanLife

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

I wanted to start off by saying that I won’t be the person that chimes in with, “Well… you need to spend at least double the time than you’re planning to visit in order to really make it worth it. A weekend (or week) just isn’t enough.” And though that may be true, it’s just not the reality for so many of us. Before traveling in the van, my wife and I were restricted, like most, to weekend trips and the week of vacation a year to somewhere new.  We never had the luxury of traveling for weeks or months …

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Winter Vanlife Adventures in Sedona, Vegas, and the Grand Canyon

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

After spending January and February on the road, traveling through the Southeast, we were back home in a excessively snowy Utah. It just so happened that as soon as we returned, the winter machine turned on and up full blast, which turned into a foot of snow every few days. Needless to say, after two weeks of it, we were anxious to get back on the road to chase some desert sun. That meant we were loading up the van again, and pointing it south, down I-15, with our eyes set on the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. With almost …

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Redwood National Park Road Trip // Largest Trees in the World

Zachary Kenney0 Comments

Even if you’ve been surrounded by forest your entire life, whether it’s Red Maples of New England, the Douglas Firs of the Pacific Northwest, the Hemlocks of Pennsylvania, nothing will prepare you for the colossal coniferous trees of the Redwood National Park. And when I say tall, I don’t just mean a few stories tall, I mean the tallest trees on earth are located along this stretch of California coastline, and accessible to nearly everyone. Trees, that defy the imagination of how large an organism can grow to be. Width at the the base larger than a swimming pool. Trunks …

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