The van had a floor and a ceiling. That was the whole build.
No bed frame. No galley. No water. None of the things that would eventually make it a house. We threw a futon mattress down on the floor and called it a bedroom.
Then we drove it to Yellowstone for twelve days.
We were not being impatient. We had been drawing this thing on paper for months and talking about it over dinner, and now it was sitting in the driveway with its floor in, and we wanted to know what it actually felt like out there. Not in theory. On a road, at night, a long way from Golden.
Neither of us had ever seen Yellowstone, and neither had the van.
The first night
We did not get far. Somewhere well short of the park we pulled off onto BLM land and stopped.
I have never been able to explain that night to anybody. We were lying on a mattress on the floor of an unfinished van with the walls still bare, and it already felt like ours. That was the night it stopped being a project. Eight years later we are still sleeping in it.
In the morning we rolled into Dubois and found the Cowboy Cafe, and we have never gotten over it. Any time the road puts us anywhere near Dubois we pull in. Eight years of driving this country and that is still true.
Twelve days
We did the geyser loop at Old Faithful and stood around with everybody else waiting on the next one to go. We hit the big things. We took the small hikes outside the park that nobody writes down. We set alarms for five in the morning and drove around looking for bears, which is what you do when everything is still new and you cannot quite believe you get to be there.
Dinner came off a Jetboil, because the Jetboil was the kitchen.
The first photograph of this trip is not the van and it is not the build. It is the Teton range.
What twelve days told us
Nothing broke.
That is the whole report. Twelve days of driving it and sleeping in it and eating out of it, and we came home without one single thing on the list to change. Long enough to know. Short enough that we had not committed to anything yet.
The part we did not see coming was how much we liked having our house with us. Not the freedom of it exactly. The having of it.
We finished the build that fall and moved in about two weeks later, in October.
Yellowstone and the Tetons, season by season, in our mountain west guide
Karlee & Jesse
