Vanlife with my person
- joshuainegt
- Aug 2
- 5 min read
A look back at fall 2025 and the summer of 2026
Between the fall 2025 vanlife trip and the one we just wrapped up, we crossed 25 states, spent 143 days, and covered 17,350 miles living out of a van.
2 trips, 143 days, 17,350 miles, 25 states
We hit 15 national parks, cooked in the van more often than we ate out, and together logged 1,832.1 human-powered miles (cycling, running, hiking, walking, and paddling).
Where we slept: 143 nights total — we spent most nights curled up in the van, but also stayed at a mix of Airbnbs, hotels, National Park campgrounds, RV parks, Harvest Host stops (8 breweries, 4 museums, 4 farms/ranches, 3 wineries, and 1 church), 9 festival-camping nights, and a few stops with friends and family (driveways, guest rooms, or air mattresses). Our longest stint was at Mammoth Lakes, 6 nights at the Old Shady Rest campground.
Where/what we ate: We had 70-80 van dinners! On the other nights, we ate out or ate with family/friends. Eating in consisted mostly of Josh's go-to rice bowls (chicken, tofu, or beans; rice or quinoa; whatever veggies were on hand; gochujang and chili crisp as a staple). We picked up a few tricks that made it easy to cook healthy meals with a lot of variety. The meals were all one-pan recipes, which made clean-up that much easier.
15 National Parks. Yes, fifteen: We made good use of our National Park Annual Pass. Joshua Tree, Guadalupe Mountains, Saguaro, and Death Valley in the fall; Zion, Bryce Canyon, Great Basin, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Crater Lake, Lassen Volcanic, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Theodore Roosevelt this trip. All of them were special in their own way (amaze, amaze, amaze!).
We also hiked at a bunch of other parks along the way, including 2 high points - Black Mesa State Park, OK and Mount Magazine State Park, AR; Navajo National Monument, AZ; Newberry National Volcanic Monument, OR; and Craters of the Moon National Monument, ID.
We had enough wildlife sightings for our own nature documentary: a hummingbird said hello at our campground in Bryce, we saw a moose mama and baby, and a grizzly bear mama and 3 cubs at Grand Teton, a rattlesnake at Zion, had a near-hit deer near Dublin, VA, saw a horned lizard near Socorro, a little white whiptail at White Sands, and a herd of bison in Theodore Roosevelt NP. There was also an 11-mile bike ride in Milwaukee that clocked "almost 1 bunny per mile." We saw plenty of other cool creatures - sandhill cranes, egrets, woodpeckers, bald eagles, lizards, groundhogs, yellow-bellied marmot, pronghorn deer, cows, cows, and more cows.
Shan Runs Vanlife! — Most days also included mileage on foot. Here's a selection of Shan's marathon+ distance runs:
Camelback Mountain, Scottsdale AZ — 26.3 mi
Zion National Park, Day 2 — 32.0 mi
Bakersfield, CA — 26.6 mi
LA to Manhattan Beach and back — 36.5 mi
LA to Long Beach and back — 49.9 mi
Devils Postpile National Monument — 26.1 mi
A 50k in and around Bend, OR — 31.4 mi
AirVenture Oshkosh — 30.2 mi
AirVenture Oshkosh, the very next day — 41.9 mi
The LA-to-Long-Beach run is basically a double marathon on its own, and the back-to-back days at Oshkosh are a special kind of impressive. Rock star.
Human-powered miles, combined:
391.8 mi (2025) + 1,440.3 mi (2026)
=> 1,832.1 mi total
Shan's numbers include:
74 PRs and 78,439 ft of elevation gain, i.e., nearly two and a half Everests.
Van drama: Drama is inevitable with a van that has over 200,000 miles on it and has been cross-country a ridiculous number of times. Over 17,000 miles, we had a handful of regular oil changes, a few visits to the car wash, and 3 major repairs. The van got (1) a new catalytic converter in El Paso, TX in 2025, (2) a new fuel injector after a tow to a Murfreesboro, TN dealership for the weekend (during which we detoured to see Cooper), and (3) a new radiator and thermostat after an overheating incident out of Billings, MT. Each repair led us to stay in each town an extra day or two.
People we saw along the way: We saw some friends and family (but would like to see more on future trips). We saw Cooper (twice), Jamie and Deepa, Matt and Banu (twice), Eric and Lucy, Bob and Turiya, Matt and Barb, Steph and Rich, and a Chicago crew including Kelzey, Chachi, Jax, Carl, Matt and Theresa, with the Family Farm in Indiana as a recurring home base. Most recently we timed our travels to be in town for Melinda's 50th and Jim's 83rd birthday celebrations.
12+ movies: You may recall that Shan likes to listen to books about places that he is running through. We did the same thing with vanlife, but the movie version. Here are some of our selections:
Zabriskie Point (1970) — filmed largely in Death Valley; watched during our Nevada desert stretch
Vanishing Point (1971) — a cult chase movie across the American Southwest desert, watched in no man's land Nevada
Sirāt (2025) — a movie about a desert rave, watched en route to Lightning in a Bottle
Palm Springs (2020) — a California-set comedy, watched in Lone Pine
Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014) — a wandering, feel-good journey story
A River Runs Through It (1992) — set, filmed, and watched in Montana
Legends of the Fall (1994) — also Montana-set (the Ludlow ranch); our 2nd Montana pick for the Big Timber/Billings leg
The Straight Story (1999) — picked as we went from Montana into North Dakota, echoing Straight's travel from Iowa to Wisconsin
Fargo (1996) — watched right around our actual stop in Fargo, ND
American Movie (1999) — shot in small-town Wisconsin, watched in Milwaukee
Porco Rosso (1992) — Miyazaki's seaplane-pilot film, picked for AirVenture Oshkosh's aviation theme
Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — a quintessential broken-down-van movie that matched our travels through NM and Arizona (and our own stretch of van repairs)
And oh boy — there are so many other travel highlights (we're certainyl missing a few...): whitewater rafting the Snake River and fireworks over Jackson, WY, all in one day; attending a Hard Fork recording in San Francisco; festival camping — six nights at Lightning in a Bottle, three at AirVenture Oshkosh; House on the Rock in WI, Acoma Pueblo in NM, comedy night in Bakersfield, renting a pontoon boat on Bass Lake, family/birthday fun at Morse Lake in Indiana; and from the fall trip, Luray Caverns, running/cycling on the Virginia Creeper Trail, a New Orleans paddlewheel cruise, a marching band competition in San Antonio, and Thanksgiving with Cooper.
Closing thoughts: Together we’ve survived some big, ridiculous, wonderful journeys. Including Shan's 2020 run across America — making it to the finish line together despite being thousands of miles apart; the East Coast Greenway — where we got engaged; and the Pacific Coast, aka our honeymoon. Shan ran through 169 towns of Connecticut, planned and supported by Josh. But vanlife is its own special adventure. No course, no clock, just the two of us, a van, and wherever the road takes us next.
We're already wondering where the next trip will take us. We might not know exactly where or when, but you can be sure we'll be building spreadsheets, taking silly selfies, and counting the miles.
*Stats compiled from Facebook, Instagram, and Strava activity data across both trips - links can be found here.
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