Family Who Lives in a Van
This Family Lives in a Decked-Out Van, and Just Wait Till You See the Kitchen!
When Tracy and Mike Kuhl, a couple from Alberta, Canada, started to get the travel bug two years ago, they knew that they'd have to get creative if they wanted to raise their teenage daughter, Sarah, and tween boys, Josiah and Samuel, on the road. But rather than chalking their idea up to an out-of-reach dream, the pair brought their tiny house living aspirations to life courtesy of some outside-of-the-box thinking and a refurbished sprinter. Thankfully, they documented their entire journey on Instagram, and we're insanely jealous.
"At the start of 2016 we found ourselves wanting something more, something different," Tracy told POPSUGAR. "We were living the Alberta oilfield dream but found ourselves missing something. We packed up our lives and a seven-bedroom home and set out for adventure in a truck and 37-foot trailer."
Although Tracy and her family loved traveling in a spacious trailer at first, she realized they needed to downsize even more after facing a few challenges while road-tripping. "Our nearly 60-foot rig was a luxury, however, it was entirely too limiting. Highway tolls, campgrounds fees, fuel costs, and city's prices quickly added up."
"We packed up our lives and a seven-bedroom home and set out for adventure."
In early 2017 while working in Canada, Tracy and her husband started throwing the idea of a sprinter around for a number of reasons: adults could stand up in it, and the cost of gas was more manageable. It was also easy to transport and a much more pragmatic choice for off-the-grid living.
All that was left to do was purchase a 3500 CAN model and get to work refurbishing it, which took much longer and was much harder than the Kuhls anticipated.
"There were bits and pieces that we pulled from Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, but in the end we really had to forge our own path," explained Tracy. "There's endless content for couples in vans as well as families with smaller children, but we found very little for older children."
Scroll through to get a look at all of the Kuhl family's adventures so far, and try not to get insanely jealous in the process.
