Van loaded, good-byes hugged and coffee mugs topped off, Jon and I hit the road on June 3, 2019. We first made some brief stops in Los Angeles, CA and Ojai, CA to say more good-byes, and then we started east. Three days later, we arrived in Kansas City, Missouri.

Why Kansas City? We were going to Kansas City because my group of close college girlfriends chose this city for our next reunion. Jon was excited to come to Kansas City, for 1) the famous Kansas City burnt ends and bar-b-q, and 2) to investigate real estate investment prospects.

Here’s what we learned in our first month of vanlife, a June spent in Kansas City, MO:

1. 1. 1. Things take MUCH longer than you would expect. We thought we’d be in KC for 2 weeks… it ended up being 3 ½ weeks! Simple things, like filling up our water tanks, getting some internet time for “work-work” or Amazon shopping, making meals in the van and even searching for a shady, breezy spot to park our tall van, could take hours. Some days, I couldn’t even recall what we were doing, where all the time went when we only checked off a couple of to-do items from our list. Sometimes it feels like having an endless weekend of errands.
      2. Lifestyle deflation is a blessing. Once you opt for vanlife, simple things that were once accessible and taken for granted become luxuries and splurges. $10 for a 24-hour pass to Planet Fitness gives you some work out time, a shower and free wi-fi for two days, if you time it right! $20 for a campsite with electric plugin gives you A/C, showers, and a beautiful landscape. Even having limited physical space and low storage capacity gives you a comforting sense that you know exactly what and where your possessions are. Everything in your small space is exactly what you have decided you need, and we have found a lot of satisfaction and gratitude in that.
      3. As someone who has lived in Southern California most of her life, accommodating quick changes in weather was something new. June is a fairly reasonable time to vanlife in Kansas City. It’s hot but still nice in a breezy, shady spot. The mornings and late evenings are cool enough, and the humidity is still mostly at bay. What we didn’t expect were the sudden rainstorms and thunder and hail! While working at Home Depot one day, I saw a mass of gray clouds moving quickly. Five minutes later, I was hurriedly throwing containers of stuff into the van as a heavy rain – and hail – comes down. This lasted for 15 minutes, and then we resumed our work. On a couple of mornings, we woke up to heavy rain and hail pelting the van. It took at least a day for me to build up the emotional fortitude to check if there was any damage on the solar panels. Luckily, they were okay.
      4. Building on the road is a slow and clumsy process. We spent several build days in a Home Depot parking lot, and they were unsurprisingly not as productive as our days at MakerPlace. I had to talk myself down from the disappointment of not getting as much done as I expected to, or was used to. I stopped caring about how it looked and was just relieved that it worked at all.
      5. State and county laws are often difficult to find online. I scoured through the Kansas City Code of Ordinances, Chapter 70 – Traffic and Vehicles and could not find any rules on oversized vehicles, staying overnight in your vehicle, or vehicle habitation in general. All I could find was that downtown has special parking rules, because of limited spots. At one point, I suggested we flag down a policeman to confirm the specific parking laws, but Jon didn’t think this would be very effective. Instead, we took our chances. Initially, we parked on the far outskirts of downtown. We then moved closer to central downtown. For six nights, we parked around the corner from The Green Lady Lounge, a live jazz joint that I highly, highly recommend (yep, we went there six different nights!). We had no issues. We did avoid the more popular “hip” streets where overnight parking in a pseudo van-RV just seemed to stick out too much. Perhaps we would have been undisturbed, but we didn’t want to take the chances.
      6. Not all Walmarts are created equally. Walmart is the only chain store we know of that openly and widely allows overnight parking and residing in your vehicle. We tried at least three different 24-hour Walmart Supercenter parking lots, but we became attached to the Walmart in Gladstone, MO. It had a quieter parking lot, cleaner restrooms, and a peaceful residential neighborhood nearby for us to walk Willie. Jon often joked that he was taking me to “only the best” of Walmart parking lots.
      7. Green spaces are everywhere in Kansas City! The city is full of parks, sometimes long and narrow as a converted divider between two streets, sometimes huge open spaces with basketball courts, baseball diamonds, playgrounds and, importantly, restrooms. Wherever we were, more often than not, some kind of park was nearby. We ducked into these peaceful green spaces frequently to walk our pup, picnic for lunch or dinner, work on our van or nap our full bellies away (Kansas City is, after all, a big barbecue travel destination!).
      8. While we could have easily found indoor A/C for ourselves, we had the added challenge of also keeping our fur-baby cool. The two biggest factors to keep the heat at bay are shade and air circulation. We learned to spend the hottest afternoons parked under a big tree (preferably by a park) or in the shade of a big building. At the very least, we put up our Reflectix window coverings to block the sun. Then, we’d open the sliding door and back doors, and create our own miniature wind tunnel. This is amazingly effective. Add to it our two 12V fans and our Maxxfan Deluxe roof vent exhaust, and you have a very breezy cool van.

Considering the work (both van build and professional) we were trying to do in Kansas City, and all the growing pains of learning van life, we still really had a great time in Kansas City. Between the live jazz on six different nights and the five different BBQ restaurants we visited, it was a fun and relaxing time! We even joined a motorcycle gang out for a night – had Miller Lites in a small bar owned by a spicy man named Willie. It was also the first time I’d seen so many fireflies! They’re beautiful! We spent many evenings strolling, mesmerized, through fields of tiny, glittering lights.

Well, I think that’s enough reflection for one destination. Thank you for your hospitality, Kansas City! You were a very patient host to us as we learned to #vanlife.

Do you have any tips for Kansas City?  We certainly hope to return in the future, so please share!