also called #vanlife · van life · vanlifer
Living and travelling in a converted van as a mobile home.
Vanlife is making a converted van your rolling home, where the same vehicle is both your bedroom and your transport. It overlaps with RVing but tends to mean something smaller and more do-it-yourself than a full motorhome. Rolling housing and travel into one saves money, but it drags in rules about where you can park overnight, where you count as living, and how the vehicle is registered.
You convert a van and cross into another country to travel and work from it. A town that bans overnight parking moves you on in the middle of the night, and when you try to prove an address for a bank or a SIM, you have no fixed home to point at.
It merges housing and transport into one cost but brings its own rules on parking, residency and vehicle registration.
The difference is the whole point, so here is each one in a line.
These differ by the vehicle and how far you roam.
Vanlife is a converted van as a home, RVing uses a larger motorhome, overlanding is long self-reliant travel over rough terrain across borders, and boat life is the same idea afloat.
Temporary import is the permit that lets you bring a vehicle into a country without paying full import duty, and self storage is where you park the belongings you are not carrying with you.
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