Jill stood on a glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and filled her water bottle from a blue stream at her feet. She got there in a 2017 Mercedes Sprinter she built out after retiring at 62. Jill spent her career as a marine scientist mapping the seafloor and hunting sunken ships, and living on boats taught her you really don't need that much. Her first big trip lasted over a year and put 31,000 miles on the van. You'll hear her two non-negotiables for a build, the mechanic move that gave her peace of mind before Alaska, the phone checklist she's tested for years, and why you don't need a finished rig to hit the road.
Follow Her Journey Her Way so you meet the next woman worth knowing. For road tips, blogs and every episode, head to SheTravelsSimple.com.

In this Episode:

• She Travels Simple: https://shetravelssimple.com/
• Composting toilet (Nature's Head, Cuddy): https://a.co/d/00jyVp8R
• Rolef Screens: https://www.rolef.ca/
• Espar diesel heater: https://a.co/d/092rjS5r
• Skoolie Swarm: https://skoolieswarm.com/
• Peace Love and Van: https://www.peacelovevans.com/

Dawn got divorced at 57 and started pet sitting on the side. In six months she slept in her own apartment ten days. So she bought a van.

Now she's 60. She walked away from her nursing job and pet sits full time out of a 2021 Ram ProMaster with two beds, one of them for her 80 year old mom.

We talk mooch docking, $5 a night camping in the Pine Barrens, a gas heater that ran all night on about a gallon, a toilet that wraps everything up like a Diaper Genie, and the night she showed up at my house not knowing a soul. Plus, mahjong.

Mentioned in this episode

Dawn's pet sitting: www.innercompassadventures.com
Laveo by Dry Flush toilet: https://dry-flush.com
Harvest Hosts: https://www.harvesthosts.com
Boondockers Welcome: boondockerswelcome.com
Skoolie Swarm: https://skoolieswarm.com/

More road tips and more women worth knowing: SheTravelsSimple.com

Nikki May is 58 and she's been living in a school bus for four years with a full size bathtub sitting right in the middle of it. She didn't wake up one day fearless. She ran a test trip with her dog in her car first, figured out the one thing she wasn't willing to give up, and sized the rest of her life around it.

We get into what the build actually cost her when she hired van guys to do a bus, where she sleeps for free, the app that holds every place she's parked in four years, and why she wishes she'd walked into a Schoolie Swarm before she spent a dime.

And the part I want you to hear: it took her about four years to take her first real solo trip. Solo doesn't show up all at once. You build up to it.

Amy showed up to her first Skoolie Swarm with no bus, no van, and no RV. What she did next is the smartest, cheapest test run I've ever seen. She's a solo mom who was nervous about everything, and she found a way to try this life without betting the house on it. Somewhere along the way she found her village, and a stranger did something for her son that made us both want to cry. If you think you need a rig before you can start, this one's for you.

If you want the hook to hold back more too, cut the last three sentences after "walked less than a mile down the road." End it there and let them wonder why.

Sandy was living on $1,200 a month on the road. At 61, after 20 years in the military, she sold her business, sold two houses, and drove off in a school bus she built herself named the Command Post.

She started in a Toyota Prius with a pop up tent, and the trick she used with that tent solved two problems at once.

In this episode I tell you her whole story. How she picked her very first stop on purpose because she didn't know one single person out there. The breakdown in a national forest with no cell service, fuel leaking on the ground, and why she called a mobile mechanic instead of a tow truck. The three questions she asks herself before she lets herself panic. Her rule for stretching fuel money. The garage sale rack she put in the middle of her living room to get from two houses down to a van.

And the thing she said to me once that changed how I talk to myself.

Her name is Sandy. She travels alone on purpose. Her answer to where are you going next is my favorite answer anybody has ever given me.

Visit SheTravelsSimple.com for more information

Ten days. Almost three thousand kilometers. One camper van with no heater, no wifi, and a rented sleeping bag she almost said no to.

I met her in line at FlyOver in Reykjavik and I dragged her back to the apartment I was staying in so you could hear this.

She's from the Netherlands. She worked non stop for years, lived for the job, and hated it. So this year she decided every euro she made was going into adventures instead of things. She answered a Facebook post from a stranger, got on a plane after one Zoom call, and spent four weeks in Iceland training Icelandic horses for free room and board.

Then she rented the cheapest van she could find on Google and drove the Ring Road backwards from the way everybody tells you to do it.

In here: how she found campsites for 15 to 21 euros a night using nothing but flags on Google Maps, why she skipped the wifi, how she got popular spots to herself, what she did on the one day the weather went bad, and why her hiking boots have holes in them after ten days. Paragliding. Ice climbing. Snorkeling between two tectonic plates. A mountain she climbed clipped to a rope the day before her flight home.

She bought one magnet the whole trip. Everything else was an experience. And then her mother saw the bank account.

If you've been sitting at your kitchen table thinking Iceland is for other people, start here.

Justine bought her bus sight unseen in South Carolina in 2019. The brake line blew off the engine before she pulled out of the parking space.

That was the easy one.

A few years later she's rolling down a highway outside New Haven at night, in the rain, with the brake pedal on the floor and 70 miles to go to her brother's house. No shoulder. No place to park a bus. She puts it on cruise control at 35 and times the traffic lights.

We talk about that night, the three days stuck in a festival parking lot in Georgia, and the mobile mechanic in Waterloo, New York who took her money and broke more than he fixed.

You'll get the stuff that actually helps. How to find parts nobody sells to the public. Why you learn the color and smell of every fluid in your rig. What roadside service she uses and why. And the one thing I told her after her first few breakdowns that took the fear out of all of it.

More on breakdowns over at ShesTravelsSimple.com.

My friend Terry called and said she got us reservations in Banff. I said sure. Then I pulled up a map and found out Banff is twenty five hundred miles from my driveway and halfway to Alaska.

I have a van built to sleep in. I took the car instead.

Here's why I made that call and how I made it work. The mattress, the window film, the toilet behind the passenger seat, the trunk I didn't know I had. And the part I wasn't expecting, which is getting out after eight hours of driving feeling like I'd only driven two.

If you don't have a van and you've been wondering if a car is enough, it's enough. I did it for a month and I'm not sorry.

For more information visit SheTravelsSimple.com