
OV: Tell us your story! How did you end up with a van?
The van was a dream of ours, when we decided that we wanted to simplify our lives. I was working as a teacher and therapist in a Pennsylvania school district. Tim owns his own business, and still does. I felt like I was working a lot and had gone through lots of changes in my job, from when I first started it in 1991. Our school district had gone through a series of furloughs, and I wasn’t furloughed, but my class sizes greatly increased and so did my work load. I loved working with the students, but I was done with the politics of education. Our son had started college, and had moved out of our house. We had a 3000 sq ft house, and with both of us working a lot, we felt like we only used our kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. The weekends found us driving to locations to mountain bike ride or snowboard in the winter, and we both realized we wanted more of that in our lives. We also realized we wanted more freedom in our lives. We also started exploring different states where we could make our lives more authentic, to the way we wanted to live. We decided Bend Oregon was the place we wanted to call our hub. We purchased a very small space that had a two car garage. Our total living space is 500sq ft, so we are very intentional about living a minimalist lifestyle. We knew we only wanted a small space as our hub, so we could focus on traveling with a van. We knew we wanted a sprinter van and we were set on a 2018 model. Tim really liked that year van. We started a conversation with Outside Van, because we had been very impressed with their builds. We then talked about what we wanted in a van, and then we began the design process. Since we were living in Pennsylvania, we did all of our designing with Nick of OSV, through phone conversations, online screen shares on the computer, and lots of emails. It was like designing a house, picking flooring, and counter tops, etc.. the whole process took almost took a year. The excitement of retiring for me in June 2019, us moving to Bend Oregon, and then in August 2019 driving to Portland to pick up our van, right before my 50th birthday was just so unreal!!! And seeing our van for the first time was a day we will always remember. It was beautiful, and just perfect! We called it Timiled, and our definition for that name became: The vessel that will enable us to drink from the Soul of the World, as we live out our dreams.


