Table of contents for Twenty: August/September 2020 in ROVA

Electric feel There’s a reason that good things are often called “electric.” The atmosphere is electric, our chemistry is electric, the lights in our homes are electric… see, good things. When you’re off-grid, electricity can be hard to come by—unless you harness the power of the sun. Renogy’s solar products are universally loved, and the 100 Watt 12 Volt Starter Kit is perfect for the vanlifer looking to download some of the sun’s sweet juice into their vehicle. renogy.com, $199.99 A party for your feet Is there anything better than taking off your steaming shoes and socks after a long hike? You could feel that amazing fresh-feet feeling all day long with Chacos Odyssey sandals, which are part sneaker, part sandal, part river-rock buffer. Made for all genders and in…

Thirty-thousand miles and 15 states ago, I began living in my 19-foot Skoolie full-time. I had purchased it in Nashville, named it Bubba, and converted it into my dream space. Having completed Route 66, I was ready for my next cross-country trek. The plan was simple: I would catch the 80 through California and Nevada; grab the 70 in Utah and drop down to Bryce Canyon for a couple of weeks; then head into Colorado for my own Rocky Mountain High experience, à la John Denver. The date was March 1st, 2020. Masks and gloves were not part of our daily wardrobe, coronavirus was not a household word, quarantine was not yet a thing, and Gavin Newsom wouldn’t issue the shelter-in-place order for another 17 days. I left San Francisco…

Life magazine was the first publication to give Nevada’s Highway 50 the name “Loneliest Highway in America,” back in 1986. The Nevada Commission on Tourism, however, was really the one to make it stick, thanks in part to its marketing campaign that included creating a Highway 50 Survival Guide, and in part to the large roadside highway signs reminding you mile after mile that you were out here... alone. A certificate was even created, and signed by the Governor of Nevada, that you would receive if you completed the route (this is still available today). Thanks to all of that, what began as a fun moniker has now become a well-known slogan for a road that stretches just over 400 miles between the cities of Fallon, Nevada, and Delta, Utah.…

I visited Louisiana with my family three times in 2015 and 2018, visiting a friend from our home state of California, and we spent roughly 15 days there in total. We spent all three trips exploring Southern Louisiana by car, usually with our friend as a guide, but occasionally by ourselves. During each visit, I spent less than one day in New Orleans; it was just a stopover. The real destination lay across Lake Pontchartrain and the Atchafalaya Basin, on the rural highways of the state. It was through these motor trips that I fell in love with Louisiana. The open road Some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen through a car window was on the I-10 freeway in Louisiana. The drive from Lafayette to Baton Rouge…

Winner of the Rumpl Original Puffy Blanket It was the evening after a day of hiking that I found myself in a local bookstore just outside of Zion. Peeking off one of the shelves was ROVA Adventure Seventeen, and it called to me. After a brief flip through, I instinctively purchased the magazine. Later, back at the spot I deemed home for this leg of the trip, I started flipping through the magazine. Article after article, from “Black Nomads Meet” [an interview with Kadedra Holmes and Bruce Edwards Jr.] to “On the Spectrum and On the Road,” [by Karly Mareka], a community of people from all different walks of life filled the pages. There were people with different ranges of skin tones, people at various stages in their life, and…

Brittany I was paying $1300 a month to rent a room in a house with four other people, and I knew there must be another way. I fell in love with bus life after watching countless videos on YouTube, and I decided it was for me! Building out my vision for my bus, Domino, has helped me to rediscover what makes me happy. I am an Air Force veteran, and I lost so much of myself conforming to what they wanted me to be. Eleven years, two months and 23 days later, I now have the freedom to be ME, and I’ve put my all into this remodel to showcase my personality and creativity. Instagram: @whereis_brittany Chris and Christi We are artists in music and film with an insatiable thirst…

The first time I drove across the country, I was 18 years old. I had just graduated high school in Massachusetts, and by some twisted mixture of influences including Jack Kerouac novels, Burt Reynolds movies and too much time on social media, I had decided that I needed to head west. I saw the cross-country road trip as an American birthright, a way to break out of the suburban waste and fly into the real world on the back of a Detroit-built V-8. So, with next to zero research and $2,000 in my pocket, I set out to buy myself a van. And boy oh boy, did I find a van. Its name was “Boat,” and it was a 1986 E-350 that had been used for 30 years as a…

My deep love for road-tripping took hold at an early age—at around four years old, if you’re wondering—in the UK. As this was slightly before I got my license, we had to rely on my uncle to do the driving. He had a shooting brake (for my American friends, that roughly translates to a station wagon), and once a year we’d load it up with supplies and generations of family members, and head from our home in Liverpool to the utter gloriousness that was a caravan camp in North Wales. The excitement started way before the car itself became involved. I remember getting a new short-sleeved shirt and having my canvas sneakers whitened in preparation, then sleeping zero winks the night before the big day. The drive itself was about…

My time in New Mexico began after I watched my last Arizona sunset in my Jeep’s rearview mirror. It was the first night of my cross-country road trip from Phoenix to Tampa, Florida, and I crossed the state line beneath a clear, darkening sky, arriving in Las Cruces shortly thereafter. Looking back now, the town’s name could not have been more fitting—I can still remember the weight of the proverbial cross I was bearing on my shoulders as I headed east. I was in New Mexico because I had been fired from my job—I had never been fired before!—after a year living out west. The shame of being let go consumed me, and inspired me to run away from Phoenix. I secured a new job back home in Miami, then…

When my boyfriend and I bought a rusty, decades-old school bus to convert into a tiny home on wheels, we had fallen in love with the idea of bus life through a million perfect squares on social media. The Instagram aesthetic for bus dwellers favors wide-lens shots of solo rigs traversing epic, empty landscapes. It was the potential for experiencing that kind of beauty in solitude that drew us in. With the bus as a protective bubble on our travels, there would be no Airbnb hosts requiring attempts at awkward small talk, and no airplane seatmates to befriend. Together but alone, we would explore dense forests and vast deserts, each devoid of any opportunity for me to stress out my hyper-introverted boyfriend with my habit of befriending every cab driver…

I looked up and froze. My foot hovered over the dusty trail. The wind whispered through the pines around me. A branch popped to my left. I definitely wasn’t alone. Of course, when I had started out the door earlier that morning, I had been alone. In fact, I’d been alone for two long weeks, halfway across the world in Switzerland. It was supposed to be just that: two weeks of self-imposed, post-travel quarantine, then I could shop for myself again and say hello to people... from a safe distance. But now, having unexpectedly flown back across the world to Spokane, I would have to quarantine again. Two more weeks of complete isolation, with only my thoughts to keep me company—and they were about as settled as a hummingbird and…

I’ve always been drawn to the excitement of cities. So, it made sense that when I started my digital nomad journey in 2014 after a decade of living in Chicago, the frenzy and exhilaration of metropolises beckoned to me first and foremost. Over the course of my nomadic adventures, I spent a winter gallivanting around the Mediterranean, which included a long stay in Barcelona, the hub of culture and food in Catalonia. I took an entire month to soak in the idiosyncrasies of New Orleans. I even hid away for a blissful eight months in Santo Domingo, the Caribbean’s largest and most boisterous city. Other stops along the way included Paris, Havana, Amsterdam, and Montreal. When I finally carved out a week in my busy travel itinerary to visit family…

Under cooperative traffic conditions, the trip between New York and Boston can take well under four hours. Traditionally, the more beaten of the paths between the cities is I-95, but mapping apps have uncovered courses that savvier travelers have taken for decades—routes that include some combination of Connecticut-15, I-91, I-84 and the Mass Pike have come to be more commonly taken. All of those roads have something to offer, so consider switching routes for the return leg. I-95 might be the less scenic and more cumbersome of the routes, but it passes through ground that is rich with culturally relevant and surprisingly popping cities. An hour and a half east of New York is New Haven, a bustling college town with a robust nightlife. Bars and music venues line the…