Couple drives around the world in their tricked out VW van

About three years ago, Brad and Sheena Van Orden were working their 9-to-5 jobs as an engineer and accountant, respectively, when they decided they needed change, an adventure.

“Everyday started just sort of slipping by and one year would pass and you didn’t have anything to show for it,” says Brad.

The idea was to drive around the world in three years.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do, so we set in motion a savings plan. It ended up taking two and-a-half years to save the money for it. Once we had enough money to leave, we left.”

Brad and Sheena, now 31 and 30 years old, recently returned after two-and-a-half years on the road, driving and living in a Volkswagon Westfalia they named Nacho.

“We bought the van in Hollywood. It had a history of Z-level celebrities before we bought it. One of them was a children’s songwriter, one of them was a location scout for movies,” he says. “We brought it home and completely gutted the thing. I’m an engineer so I used computer aided design to model the skin of the van in CAD. Then I designed all new cabinets for it and had them CNC cut. Also, I designed a water purification system that lives underneath the floor. I designed a heat exchanger that goes underneath the van that uses the engine’s heat to heat 30 gallons of water while we drive, so that you can then take hot showers in the shower that I installed in the back door. In the end we had everything we needed.”

The couple took off from their home in Arizona and headed to Mexico, through South America, over to Asia and then Europe, eventually visiting 34 countries. When they hit an ocean, they’d meet their van on the other side.

“We did five container ships. The first one was from Panama to Columbia, from Argentina to Malaysia, from Thailand to India, India to Turkey and Belgium to Nova Scotia.”

At the start of the trip the couple traveled without any maps, just relying on directions from locals. But after many wild goose chases they bought a GPS in Panama. And since the car tended to break down about every 200 miles, Brad learned to fix it himself.

“The beginning of the trip I didn’t really have a good idea of how cars worked. But I did have this big, thick owner’s manual. At the beginning, like in Mexico and down through central America, I was lured in by the cheap prices of the local mechanics. But I quickly found out that every time they would touch something, it would break 100 miles later. So out of desperation I just started doing everything myself. I made a new rule that only I was allowed to touch the car. In the end, I ended up pretty much replacing the entire car along the way. The transmission failure, various wheel bearing failures and CV joint failures and suspension issues. I mean, you name it, it happened.”

They traveled with a roof rack full of spare parts and tools, but there was one piece of technology they purposely left behind.

“We didn’t have a telephone during our trip. For almost three years we weren’t able to call people and people weren’t able to call us. Which in the end was really liberating. In fact, when we got got back to the United states we begrudgingly bought a really crappy cell phone and people then were able to contact us. I was reluctant to actually pick it up when it would ring because I didn’t want to have that intrusion in my life. It was one of those reverse culture shock things.”

When the couple returned to the United States in June, they took a road trip across the country to choose a place to live, and they settled on Seattle, which is also offering its own form of culture shock.

“We became a little more socially awkward, I’m realizing now that we’re back in America. What I mean by that is, I feel like I want to be friends with everybody. I meet people on the street and I just want to talk. For example, we picked up this new, free barbecue from Craigslist and we went to the guy’s house and I was like, ‘What’s your story?’ He was like, ‘Get out of here. Just take my barbecue.’ I was like, ‘Wait! Are you moving?’ I just want to slow down and get to know people and I guess that’s not really normal.”

After two and-a-half years on the open road, Sheena was ready to return home.

“She had really craved having a routine and having a garden and the feeling of a Friday afternoon to look forward to the weekend, that kind of thing. But for myself, I learned a lot about the world and about myself while I was out there. I felt that when I got back to the United States, I was moving away from that constant state of discovery that each day brought. It was hard to accept that that was all voluntarily over and I have to transition back into a normal life.”

Brad and Sheena wrote a book about their drive from Arizona to the southern tip of South America, and you can buy it here.