Now she's 60. She walked away from her nursing job and pet sits full time out of a 2021 Ram ProMaster with two beds, one of them for her 80 year old mom.

We talk mooch docking, $5 a night camping in the Pine Barrens, a gas heater that ran all night on about a gallon, a toilet that wraps everything up like a Diaper Genie, and the night she showed up at my house not knowing a soul. Plus, mahjong.

Mentioned in this episode

Dawn's pet sitting: www.innercompassadventures.com
Laveo by Dry Flush toilet: https://dry-flush.com
Harvest Hosts: https://www.harvesthosts.com
Boondockers Welcome: boondockerswelcome.com
Skoolie Swarm: https://skoolieswarm.com/

More road tips and more women worth knowing: SheTravelsSimple.com

We get into what the build actually cost her when she hired van guys to do a bus, where she sleeps for free, the app that holds every place she's parked in four years, and why she wishes she'd walked into a Schoolie Swarm before she spent a dime.

And the part I want you to hear: it took her about four years to take her first real solo trip. Solo doesn't show up all at once. You build up to it.

If you want the hook to hold back more too, cut the last three sentences after "walked less than a mile down the road." End it there and let them wonder why.

She started in a Toyota Prius with a pop up tent, and the trick she used with that tent solved two problems at once.

In this episode I tell you her whole story. How she picked her very first stop on purpose because she didn't know one single person out there. The breakdown in a national forest with no cell service, fuel leaking on the ground, and why she called a mobile mechanic instead of a tow truck. The three questions she asks herself before she lets herself panic. Her rule for stretching fuel money. The garage sale rack she put in the middle of her living room to get from two houses down to a van.

And the thing she said to me once that changed how I talk to myself.

Her name is Sandy. She travels alone on purpose. Her answer to where are you going next is my favorite answer anybody has ever given me.

Visit SheTravelsSimple.com for more information

I met her in line at FlyOver in Reykjavik and I dragged her back to the apartment I was staying in so you could hear this.

She's from the Netherlands. She worked non stop for years, lived for the job, and hated it. So this year she decided every euro she made was going into adventures instead of things. She answered a Facebook post from a stranger, got on a plane after one Zoom call, and spent four weeks in Iceland training Icelandic horses for free room and board.

Then she rented the cheapest van she could find on Google and drove the Ring Road backwards from the way everybody tells you to do it.

In here: how she found campsites for 15 to 21 euros a night using nothing but flags on Google Maps, why she skipped the wifi, how she got popular spots to herself, what she did on the one day the weather went bad, and why her hiking boots have holes in them after ten days. Paragliding. Ice climbing. Snorkeling between two tectonic plates. A mountain she climbed clipped to a rope the day before her flight home.

She bought one magnet the whole trip. Everything else was an experience. And then her mother saw the bank account.

If you've been sitting at your kitchen table thinking Iceland is for other people, start here.

That was the easy one.

A few years later she's rolling down a highway outside New Haven at night, in the rain, with the brake pedal on the floor and 70 miles to go to her brother's house. No shoulder. No place to park a bus. She puts it on cruise control at 35 and times the traffic lights.

We talk about that night, the three days stuck in a festival parking lot in Georgia, and the mobile mechanic in Waterloo, New York who took her money and broke more than he fixed.

You'll get the stuff that actually helps. How to find parts nobody sells to the public. Why you learn the color and smell of every fluid in your rig. What roadside service she uses and why. And the one thing I told her after her first few breakdowns that took the fear out of all of it.

More on breakdowns over at ShesTravelsSimple.com.

I have a van built to sleep in. I took the car instead.

Here's why I made that call and how I made it work. The mattress, the window film, the toilet behind the passenger seat, the trunk I didn't know I had. And the part I wasn't expecting, which is getting out after eight hours of driving feeling like I'd only driven two.

If you don't have a van and you've been wondering if a car is enough, it's enough. I did it for a month and I'm not sorry.

For more information visit SheTravelsSimple.com

I'm going to tell you their stories. What they risked. What it cost. What they'd do different if they had it to do over.

I'm not going to tell you it's easy. I'm going to tell you it's possible, over and over and over, until you believe me.