Peaks and Valleys

It has been over one year since we set out on this vanventure. In that time, we have toured many states, met loads of great people, gotten married, learned how to live in a van, and learned a lot about ourselves! The peaks have been amazing and filled my heart with the joy and thirst for life I have always searched for! Being able to choose where we go and what we do is a great gift! 

It also makes for a lot of decision making and working together as a team. Zach and I have always laughed when people say they could never live in a van together for as long as we have because it really is pretty easy for us. However, during this last rainy bout we dealt with in Canada, we both got a good picture of what people were talking about. We didn't have an outlet for a lot of our energy and we sat inside the van a lot. There is not a lot of new topics for conversation that come up from staring out the front window all day at the rain. I started looking at our relationship a little too closely and began getting too critical of myself and Zach. It got pretty tense at times and we had some epic battles. The van started feeling pretty small. 

But a huge plus for dealing with relationship issues while living in a van is, you have to deal with them. There's no escaping to work or to a friend's house. There were no other activities to keep us from working on what needed to be worked on. This proved to be both good and bad. I've learned that sometimes its nice to walk away from a problem for awhile and deal with it at a later time. But it can also be good to just forge ahead and deal with the issue all at once. Thankfully, we were able to deal with our issues and make our relationship stronger! 

Living in a van with your spouse has its difficulties, but I feel our home made us deal with our differences and learn how to support each other a lot faster then we might have in a bigger house with other responsibilities. I'm not sure exactly why I'm sharing this on the blog, except that its a part of our vanventures. Lots of people tell us how lucky we are and how exciting our trip is and we agree whole-heartily with them. But it is still real life and there are still emotions and issues that come up for us too. Because we are in our van, we have things we have to deal with that others probably don't, but we also get the benefit of being together to deal with those things. I'm sure there will be more peaks and valleys to come,

and I'm happy to take on them both with my vanventuring husband, Zach:)