i was catching up on emails this morning after our internet-less weekend away and a wonderful letter from Anna Fusco was just so awesomely serendipitous & co-incidental, as i had literally just read this book and listened to this podcast.

both are stories of people who one day decided to hit the road and leave their ordinary lives behind – whether it was to go on a quest, or for no particular reason at all but to experience the open road… Anna & Nate are on the same path, having bought a thirty year old camper van and setting off on April 1st “with nothing but our cameras, our dog, the books we couldn’t bear to leave behind, and a new sleeping bag courtesy of my mother.” 

Since then, we’ve been traveling the U.S. without a calendar or a particular destination, living off of canned beans and tortilla chips. I’ve been religiously documenting every step of my wanderlust, the beauty and the breakdowns. Trust me that the van isn’t the only thing having an occasional meltdown. But that’s life, that’s van life, and I like it.

Everywhere we stop, people tell us they wish they could do what we do. I want people, women especially, to know that they CAN live in their VW campers and eat their cake too. I say women in particular because for some time it appeared to me that this was a seemingly male dominated “lifestyle,” attainable only by ex-professionals turned religious surfers (i.e. Foster Huntington, another big inspiration) – not by shrimpy twenty-something city girls too attached to their Swedish Hasbeens to “rough it” and too afraid of big waves to surf.

be sure to follow their adventures at Anna’s blog Dama and Dig. all photos by Anna Fusco.