On our way up north from Fort Myers, Florida, we decided to stop in a town that wound up being one of the most memorable days of our road trip through Florida, to the town of Crystal River. The town itself was no different than the surrounding towns we’d driven through for hours. But for some reason, this town is the winter destination for countless Manatees during the winter months to escape the cold waters of the Gulf. And when we arrived at Three Sisters Springs, it felt like we stepped into a tropical jungle in another world with how …
Author: Zachary Kenney
Full Van Tour & Build Video | Adventure Campervan Ford Transit 350 AWD
After dreaming about building an adventure-ready campervan for over 10 years, my wife and I finally build our dream rig in 2023. We chose the big Ford Transit 350 Extended AWD as the base for our build-out to live, cook, and work out of. So far, we’ve been on the road for over 2 months and loving every minute of living on the road and living out of our van! This build took us the better part of 5 months straight and was completely exhausting. No sponsors, no outside help, just my wife and I spending every night after our …
Moorea… The Better Island than Tahiti
The Island of Moorea, truly one of the most visually stunning places I’ve seen, let alone been to in person. Eight massive, jungle covered peaks extend out of the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Coral reefs wrap around the entire island, creating turquoise blue lagoons that surround the beaches on this paradise. Sharks and turtles navigate in and out of the lagoons, across their homes within healthy coral reefs. And if it wasn’t already amazing enough, you could stay in a bungalow on the water, for $100 a night! Too good to be true? As much as it seems like …
1 Month and 4,000 Miles On the Road | VanLife Update
After 6 months of exhausting work, burning the candle at both ends, we somehow met our absurd goal of finishing our van build and hitting the road on December 15th, 2023. Our plan was to drive east, across the country, to celebrate Christmas with our families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Best part of this plan, is for the first time in 6 years, we were able to bring our dog Gregor home with us! After the holidays, we would start heading south, stopping in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Savannah, Georgia for New Years, and then eventually to …
Morro Bay | Ideal Beach Town Frozen in Time
Morro Bay, located along the central coast of California, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, just north of San Luis Obispo, has become our new favorite beach town in California. Better than Huntington Beach, better than Ocean Beach, and definitely better than the LA beaches. Morro Bay, with it’s mild weather as we head into winter and the California sun strong as ever. The sounds of waves crashing can be hurd throughout town, as well as the smell of saltwater that accompanies it. You can throw a rock from the town’s main strip into the harbor it’s so close, or …
VAN Series: First Shakedown & Road Trip in the Van
When tradition and a testing opportunity meet, you get a fantastic first van trip that took us to Las Vegas and the California Coast. After spending the previous 6 months hard at work to build out our Ford Transit, named Hoagie, to be able to chase sun over the upcoming winter, we wanted to test it out first on the road. And this timed up perfectly with our annual tradition of heading to the California beaches over the thanksgiving weekend. To add to some perfect timing, the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix F1 race was the weekend before Thanksgiving. So …
VAN Series: How to Plan Your Van Conversion & Build (Vanlife)
You can never plan too much when it comes to building the your own Campervan. Some people design and plan for years, while other wing it and plan it as they build. There are pros and cons to both methods, with the obvious ones being the planners will spend less money on mistakes and will not be held up by shipping times, while the spontaneous builders will be on the road way sooner, but will inevitably run into way more issues along the way. For our build, like most, we fall somewhere in the middle. In this post, I will …
Dream Trip to the Islands of Tahiti & Moorea | VIDEO
This year, my wife and I escaped the historic winter in Utah to French Polynesia to the islands of Tahiti and Moorea. We were shocked to see how much different this island chain was compared to Hawaii. This place is drastically more beautiful and far less developed. The diving with Black-tip Reef Sharks were unbelievable, the food with its French influence was amazing, and of course, this place looks (and is) truly a paradise! Throughout the week, we stayed in small little cottages just a stones throw, or sometimes even on, the water. Every day, we went snorkeling, hung out …
Climbing the Roadside Crag – Wall Street down in Moab
There are only a handful of climbing crags that it seems like every climber in Utah has checked off, as sort of a right of passage, if you will. There are the classics in the Cottonwood Canyons near salt lake, the conglomerate caves in American Fork, the boulders down in Joe’s Valley, and of course the most easily accessible of them all, Wall Street down in red rock desert of Moab. Sure, people come here for the classic slab and crack climbs that run parallel to the mellow Colorado River that runs through the desert. But the true reason why …
Stanley Idaho | Paradise in the Sawtooth Mountains
I am not sure a more perfect representation of a mountain exists than the one that sits in Stanley, Idaho. A town whose population, of mere 121 people, is outnumbered by the number of mountain peaks that surround it. Stanley sits in a valley at 6,000ft, tucked underneath one of the most incredible mountain ranges in the world, the Sawtooths. This mountainscape is what you picture when you imagine jagged, rocky peaks that hold snow well into the summer months. And at the base of those mountains are unimaginably blue lakes that drain into river filled with sockeye salmon and …