FINDING SOPHROSYNE: AKA SOPHY

I'm a little unclear how Vanlife ever jumped onto our radar. I believe it was when Lee sent me a youtube video of a home made from shipping containers. The video featured several different styles of unique homes, one being a van. I couldn't believe that there was a real bed, a toilet, and a shower! I never enjoyed tent camping but I knew I liked hiking and traveling. I felt that this would be a great way to see the outdoors but in a much more comfortable way.

Beyond travel, I think we both were in the same mindset of wanting to pare down our belongings. We both felt that having too much STUFF required too many daily decisions and decision fatigue is real. We are far from minimalists but we were on board with the idea of selecting items we thought were the most important to us and discovering how right or wrong really were. We saw this experience as a way to break ourselves down so we can build ourselves back up.

Ultimately, it seemed like a fun engineering and design challenge, plus it would be a great team-building project for me and Lee. I'm pretty sure we started discussing the idea in July of 2021 and by mid-September of 2021, we had our van.

We had a plan: fix up the house, design and build a van into an RV, sell the house, and go on the road for at least 6 months.

While finding our van only ended up taking two months, the first 7 weeks included me obsessively searching on facebook marketplace and even stalking (okay, imposing friendly interrogation) random van owners I'd see around town. We aren't particularly savvy when it comes to automotive mechanics. Not to mention we don't know anything about diesel engines. The vans seemed so expensive and were all out of town. We didn't have the ability to take off across the state of Florida mid-week to look at a van we didn't know how to evaluate when we got there.

Enter- The Florida Van Man!

I saw this video of a guy who calls himself Florida Van Man (aka Bill Gerker). He was helping someone evaluate a van to see if it was worth buying! I immediately sent the video to Lee saying we needed to hire this guy to help. I connected with Bill and learned he would scout out a van for us, evaluate it, and even help negotiate the price. I had been eyeing three vans for sale and it turned out that he felt one was worth checking out. Bill traveled from Deltona to Tampa area, checked out the van, negotiated the price, and had his buddy Mike drive it back to Deltona.

Here is the video of when Bill saw our van!

Bill babysat our van for 2 weeks before we came to pick her up, even fixing the "black death". Working with Bill was the best experience and we continued to lean on him during our build and while out on the road. We are Patreon supporters as we want him to continue helping other future VanLifers!

Naming Sophy

Anyone starting VanLife knows you have to name your van! There are so many funny and creative names out there and we knew we wanted a name to be meaningful and unique. Lee specifically said he didn't want to choose a van name that was hard to pronounce or had a nickname. As I was looking for names, I found Sophrosyne. I had no clue how to pronounce it (Sah-fros-inee) but man it totally spoke to what we were trying to do. Of course, we nicknamed her Sophy and now we could start the build!