The Vandersons
Trading square footage for square miles, Ashley and Derek swapped their house keys for van life and discovered that laughter and adventure take up the least space.
- Heather Anne Lee
They call themselves the Vandersons now—Derek and Ashley Anderson, a couple who sold nearly everything they owned, packed their lives into a van named Rhiskey, and hit the road. One year later, they’re somewhere between a glacier and a desert highway, still wide-eyed, still laughing, still marveling at the fact that they did it. They left behind jobs, a house, and the routines of Winter Garden for something much less certain but far more alive. And what they’ve found along the way is joy—not the glossy, Instagram-filter kind, but the real, gritty, belly-laughing, sometimes mosquito-bitten joy.
The idea started like so many radical ideas do: as a whisper. In the thick of the pandemic, Ashley was teaching remotely, Derek was furloughed from Disney, and they suddenly had what modern couples almost never get—time. They took a 45-day road trip in their Ford Explorer, and Ashley found herself teaching class from the rim of the Grand Canyon. “That trip showed us how good life feels when it’s simple, shared, and full of new places,” Derek recalls. But when they returned home, the whisper wouldn’t leave. Ashley was watching her Sundays dissolve into dread over the coming school week, and Derek, ever the planner, began plotting something bigger.
There wasn’t one big Hollywood moment where they decided. It was more like a slow ache that turned into conviction. Ashley says, “I wasn’t enjoying the changes in teaching and knew I wanted out.” Derek adds that it became real the day they locked their front door for the last time. They had sold the cars, the business, the furniture. “We stood on the porch and realized we weren’t coming back,” he says. Nervous, yes. But free.
Van life, as they describe it, is less about routines and more about rhythms. “We have van days, where we work on videos, driving days, or adventure days,” Ashley explains. Derek handles the planning—part spreadsheet, part serendipity. Sometimes it’s timed National Park reservations; sometimes it’s stumbling into a bar in Terlingua, Texas, swapping chili cook-off stories with strangers who feel like family by the end of the night.
The joys have been extraordinary: flying over Denali, landing on a glacier, watching the midnight sun hover at its lowest point over the Arctic Ocean, spotting humpback whales and puffins in their element. Ashley beams when she talks about animals: “I could watch them all day long. It’s the most joyful thing for me.”
But the surprises have been quieter, too. Like realizing she actually loves the van. “I thought I’d last a month,” Ashley admits. “Now I feel so at peace, carrying my home with me everywhere I go.”
For Derek, even disasters carry hidden gifts. When a cracked oil pan in Newfoundland stranded them for six weeks, they expected frustration. Instead, it turned into slow evenings by the bay, generous locals who took them in, and time for him to learn video editing. “Problems often turn into the best chapters,” he says. “At least, once you’ve cooled down enough to laugh about them.”
Of course, living in 80 square feet with another human (and their dog, Pete) isn’t all sunsets and sea otters. There are mosquitoes, flat tires, endless dust on the Dempster Highway, and the constant puzzle of keeping everything charged, cooled, and stored. But Ashley, who confesses to loving organization, finds a strange delight in reworking their tiny space. “I get excited about figuring out how to make it more practical,” she laughs. Derek’s approach is more pragmatic: accept the chaos, solve the problem, and then laugh about it later. “Honestly, if we didn’t have the frustrating parts of travel, we wouldn’t get to celebrate the wins.”
And what about “enough”? For Derek, enough is a safe spot to sleep, internet to keep up with the outside world, and the three of them together. For Ashley, enough is time—time not sold to jobs that drained her, time not traded away for two days off a week. “Why give all your precious time away just to have two days for yourself?” she asks. “It’s not rewarding anymore.”
And somewhere between the mosquitoes and the avalanches, the couple has discovered something surprising: their marriage, after 16 years, still had new depths. “This journey has brought us closer,” Ashley says, “which is surprising, because I thought we were already very close.” They’ve been through long distance, new cities, IKEA furniture, starting businesses, building a house, and a pandemic. Now they spend nearly every hour together, and still want more. Derek shrugs, amused. “We actually like being around each other. People complained during the pandemic about their partners, and we couldn’t relate.”
Their secret is balance: Derek hikes and edits videos, Ashley reads and walks in nature, and then they come back together to share what they’ve found. Space apart, then togetherness—repeat. It seems to be working.
Ashley, who calls herself “an anxious planner,” says she’s learned to trust Derek’s steady hand. “He always has my needs in mind,” she says. “If we’ve been off grid, he’ll make sure we find a local watering hole so I can feel community again.” Derek, for his part, has learned to let go. “I like control,” he admits, “but I grow most when I lose it. Detours make better stories than perfect plans.”
They’ve also discovered that “home” is not four walls, but a series of small connections. In Winter Garden, they loved the festivals, the businesses, the community that welcomed them. On the road, they’ve collected stories instead: a real-life rancher who could have walked off the set of Yellowstone, small-town watering holes where locals still know the history of the land, and chili cook-off competitors in Texas who turned strangers into friends before the night was over. They still keep in touch with many of these people, social media now serving as a virtual front porch.
So what is joy to the Vandersons? For Ashley, it’s peace—simple contentment, not necessarily fireworks. For Derek, it’s momentum with meaning: the act of moving toward a place you’ve never been, solving a hard problem, or creating something that connects with strangers online. Together, their joy looks like watching an avalanche thunder down a mountain while they grin like kids, or pulling over on a whim just because the view is too good to ignore. It looks like evenings by a bay when the engine has failed, or the moment when the midnight sun hovers so low you forget the concept of time.
The road, they say, still feels right, so they’re not rushing into a next chapter. Europe might beckon one day. Another business, maybe. Or maybe they’ll just keep driving until Rhiskey decides otherwise. For now, they’re content. “Home is your loved ones, your routines, your joy,” Ashley says. “I have all of that every day, no matter where we’re parked.” Derek grins, the practical one who can’t resist a closing line: “We’ll keep going until the road tells us otherwise.”
