the beginning…

One day over breakfast, Wolf started cultivating the idea of a road trip, through the Americas, in a Westy – the classic Volkswagen Vanagon camper vans you might imagine living in down by a river somewhere…

At the time it seemed funny. And fun. So we kept joking about it.

And then we started reading about other people who were doing something similar. Because, you know, it was just fun.

And then we casually checked Craigslist to see what kind of vans were even out there. Just because we were curious. And that, my friends, was the beginning of the end.

From there, it escalated into an all-out, full-speed-ahead, take-no-prisoners onslaught of all Westy, all the time, laser-focused search mode. Our life slowly evolved from fun observers of Westy culture, into hourly scouring of Craigslist ads, obsessive evaluation of mechanical attributes, and evening-long debates about Subaru conversions. We learned about the cult following, and the resultant exorbitant price one pays for a 25+ year old vehicle, and somehow we kept on looking because… it’s a disease. And we are a real life cautionary tale.

Because one fateful day in July 2014, we bought our very own Westy:

And it was awesome.

And then… we realized what we were getting ourselves into.