043: A conversation on life & travel with Alex Ulmke -AGirlAndHerVan

Alex Ulmke dropped her day job, bought a van and has spent the past year traveling and finding a new way to experience life.  In today’s show, she shares with us why she wanted to do that and what she’s learned along the way. Transcript: Welcome to The Art of Living big. My name is Betsy Pake entrepreneur, author and personal success coach. This is the show that brings you stories and small ideas to help you live a big life. I hope this once a week podcast will inspire you, motivate you and encourage you to think differently about what could be possible for your life. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let’s go live big. Alright, so I have with me today, my friend Alex on the phone. Hey, Alex, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So tell everybody a little bit about yourself and and where you are. Um, well, right now I’m sitting in Alaska, and I’m trying to steal the Wi Fi from wherever. And yeah, I’ve been just drove up here a few days ago. So I’ve been up here for about two weeks from Washington and I live in my VW bus. So fun. So I found you, like online because and everybody that’s listening to the show that’s a regular has heard me talk about how my daughter wants to live in a van. And you’ve sort of tell tell me kind of how this whole thing started. And really, now you’ve created like your own little girl in a van community. It’s been super amazing, actually. So I started off like completely, it was totally on a whim the whole thing actually. So I just actually, it’s hard to even say it’s also eight in the morning here. So I’m still waking Yeah. Um, so I was living in Seattle working full time for the past three years ever since I graduated college, and I bought the van, kind of on a whim. And I knew that I wanted to live into the live in the van full time at some point. And I didn’t really know exactly when that was going to happen, or how that was going to look. And then kind of the more and more that I started, like getting it to my job. And I started, you know, analyzing my future, I realized that I wasn’t really going the direction I wanted. And I was trying to kind of reconfigure my life within my job and maybe looking for new opportunities. And then I realized that if I really wanted to radically change my life, I needed to make a radical change. And so I quit my job. I moved full time into my van. And I started the girl in her van blog and Instagram as like half travel half like VW van nerd, because I didn’t want to put my friends through like, Oh, look at pure I am in this beautiful place on my personal Instagram because right isn’t really yeah, I wanted it to be a little bit more of just kind of like, this is how I did it. This is how I like made this table and stuff like that. And people just really seemed to connect with my story. I think being alone, and I think being a girl and being 20. I was 26 when I started. Yeah, I think that was a huge, you know, a lot of people talk about stuff. But I don’t really feel like a lot of people actually will get up and go Yeah, and I think when there are people that are representing that in a really organic way, as much as social media can be organic. I think that people see that. And they really like want to expand to connect with that. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s so true. And I think that many times, like we’ll have an idea or a dream or something we want to do. But before it can even get any legs, we shut ourselves down and go oh, but I couldn’t do that. And a lot of is just because we don’t know anybody that has like,