Full-time van dweller, part-time hermit, and unpaid butler to two cats.
I enjoy photographing wildlife, writing helpful articles about life in a van in nature, and inspiring and educating people about our natural world. Here’s the longer version.
How I ended up here
I used to own a house, and I paid for it by renting the upstairs out on Airbnb. It turned out houses and vans both come with their own lists of problems, and sharing my home with a steady stream of guests was too loud and too stressful for an introvert like me.
After three years of that, I decided I’d rather have the problems that come with nature, adventure, and solitude.
So in April 2023, I moved into a van, and I haven’t looked back.
It didn’t come completely out of nowhere. I thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2014 and the Appalachian Trail in 2015 (after a failed attempt in 2011), and a few thousand miles of walking left me pretty sure I wanted to keep living outside.
The main obstacle was money.
For a few years I worked as a clinical tech at a wilderness-based drug rehab in the mountains of North Carolina. I grew a lot working with people at the very beginning of their recovery, but the burnout was real, especially for an introvert.
So, back before it was common, I worked my way into remote work, specifically so I could keep living close to nature and far from the noise of the city.
The cats, my daughters
Post-COVID, I almost talked myself out of the whole thing because of Boudica (calico) and Pooka (…brown). I had two cats and a deep belief that I owed them a life with walls and a couch.
It turns out they adapted to the van faster than I did. They’re seasoned adventure cats now, and I’d feel guilty putting them back in a house. If you asked them, they’d tell you they run this operation, and honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong.
Not built for “normal”
I’m neurodivergent (introvert, ADHD, social anxiety, the full starter pack), so “normal life” and I never quite clicked. There were years of fear and depression, of white-knuckling jobs, of missing the unwritten social rules everyone else seemed to know, and of generally struggling with the friends, family, and romance side of being human.
I didn’t figure it all out. But over time I built a life that fits me. And to my own surprise, I found a partner too: Alex Noriega, an award-winning nature photographer and fellow nomadic introvert. (We met through online dating, which felt like an unfortunate necessity at the time.) Since December 2025 we’ve driven thousands of miles across the country together, which is a lot of togetherness for two people who need plenty of alone time. Somehow it works really well.
My kind of van life
If you’re picturing someone free-soloing a cliff at golden hour, that’s not me. My van life is the slow, quiet, nerdy version. A normal week looks something like this:
- Parking somewhere remote in a national forest
- Taking slow walks in the woods with the cats (they just follow me around, and it still amazes me)
- Photographing wildlife with my Canon R7 and 100–500mm lens
- Working my very ordinary remote 9–5
- Playing Path of Exile 2 with my boyfriend and our friends who live in actual houses
- Looking at things I found outside under my microscope
- Metal detecting, visiting nearby historic sites, and reading about the people who explored these places before me
- Learning the local birds, plants, animals, and rocks
- Sharing bits of it on Instagram
- Clumsily painting with watercolors and drawing
What this site is for
Mostly I’m following my curiosity and seeing where it leads. But if this site does anything, I hope it:
- Gently encourages fellow introverts to step a little outside their comfort zone, only if they want to
- Shows that van life and time in nature don’t have to mean extreme sports and glamour shots
- Shares what I’m learning about nature, science, backcountry living, raising adventure cats, love on the road, and living well as a neurodivergent introvert
- Makes “different” feel a little more normal, maybe builds a little community, and spreads some joy where it can
That’s the story so far. Pull up a chair at a quiet campsite and stay a while.