Noami Grevemberg has been living out of her 1985 Volkwagen Van since 2016. Noami has created a platform to make van life more diverse and accessible.
Noami Grevemberg is an activist, podcaster and entrepreneur. In 2016, she and her husband Dustin left their home in New Orleans and moved into a 1985 Volkswagen Van. The pair has figured out how to make van life sustainable for them. They make a living as digital nomads. They do their best to practice a zero-waste lifestyle. And Noami has created a platform and community of BIPOC and LGBTQ van lifers with her platform Diversify Vanlife.
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Noami Grevemberg:
Before van life, I held on so tight to things. I wouldn't relax, but being in that vulnerable space of not knowing how I'm going to make money, how I'm going to put gas in the tank or anything like that, or where my career is going, it created space for me to learn how to release, let go, and allow. When I started doing that, the world started opening up for me. I know it sounds super flowery, but it's the truth.
Shelby Stanger:
Noami Grevemberg is an activist, podcaster and entrepreneur. In 2016, she and her husband, Dustin, left their home in New Orleans and moved into a 1985 Volkswagen van. They originally planned to live in their van for a year, driving around the United States, but one year turned into two years, which turned into three years. They've now been at it for six years, and they aren't planning on stopping anytime soon. Noami and Dustin are committed to making van life sustainable in multiple ways. They figured out how to make a living as digital nomads, they try to practice a zero waste lifestyle, and Noami has created a community of BIPOC and LGBTQ van lifers with her platform, Diversify Van Life.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. Noami grew up on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. When she was a kid, she learned about Alaska and the aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights. Ever since then, it's been her dream to get out there and see it for herself. In her late teens, Noami came to the US for college. After graduating, she fell into a more traditional lifestyle with an apartment and a 9:00-5:00 job. That lifestyle though, contributed to some mental health challenges for Noami, so she and her husband decided it was time to make a change. Noami Grevemberg, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Noami Grevemberg:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Shelby. I'm really excited for our chat today.
Shelby Stanger:
Where are you right now?
Noami Grevemberg:
I am in Zion area. I've been here for the past week or so, and it's been so damn windy. I thought my van was going to blow away yesterday. Then last night actually, we had 60 mile per hour gusts, but it's been really beautiful, sunny.
Shelby Stanger:
You've had a lot of wild ideas. How did you get the wild idea to just quit your job and become a full-time van lifer, eco-activist, coach, adventurer? What were you doing before, first of all?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, before, I was an environmental scientist right out of college. That was pretty great. I mean, I really loved what I did. I got to work outdoors in the swamps and marshes of Louisiana. It's just such a beautiful, unique landscape. I was really passionate about it, but in college, the day I met my partner, actually, I shared with him an idea that I've been stewing on for many years. It's like, "Wouldn't it be cool to travel the country in a van and visit all the national parks?" After graduation, we went on to careers, we went on to just building that life, that roadmap, just following that roadmap that most people say that you have to follow. We were doing that. Right? Then I just started to struggle with depression and anxiety.
Noami Grevemberg:
I just started feeling like I wasn't fulfilling my dreams. I wasn't becoming the person that I wanted to be. I was moving much further away from that. In the process I decided, well, you know what? Maybe I should just dig up this old dream that I had shared with my partner years ago about traveling the country in a van and visiting all the national parks. One day, I met him in the kitchen after work, cooked dinner, and I said, "Hey, you know what? I got something I want to share with you." He's like, "Well, you know what? I have something I want to ask you." It was seriously the most serendipitous thing that's ever happened to me, because he wanted to do the same thing.
Shelby Stanger:
What? I have total goosebumps. That's crazy. I think that's so interesting. First of all, amazing that you lept and made the leap, but to actually make the leap is really, really hard. Talk to me about how did you know? Did it just come to you that night? What was the sign when you were making dinner, and your husband and you both just needed to talk to each other? Had there been events brewing that built up to that, or was it just random?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, the events leading up to it, definitely. He found me one evening curled up on the couch, mid panic attack. For a long time, I was suffering alone in this space of anxiety and depression. He didn't know, nobody knew, none of my friends, my family members, until that day he found me on the couch. That was the day that made me realize that I couldn't continue this way. I started to reevaluate my life's trajectory and started that wondering the what ifs. There's got to be something else, there's got to be more. Is this it? We go to college, we get the job, we buy the house, we have the kids. Nothing's wrong with that, but it just didn't feel like it was the right path for me.
Shelby Stanger:
Is this it is such a powerful question. It's really hard though, to take that leap to then say, "I don't think this is it. I think there's more out there."
Noami Grevemberg:
Right.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you guys all of a sudden ... I mean, both of you came to each other at the same time. You had this wild idea, "Let's do it," but then to actually do it is another thing. Talk to me about that process and what went through your head?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, what went through my head was, "We got to do it now or we're going to talk ourselves out of it." We basically gave ourselves three months to get the van, quit our jobs and hit the road. That's what we did. I mean, I don't recommend it to most people, but I am a head first in kind of person. We just pretty much dove in immediately.
Shelby Stanger:
Speed is your friend when it comes to wild ideas. Oh, I love that. Wait, you got yourself ... Let's back up. You went out and you bought a van.
Noami Grevemberg:
Yeah, we did. We went out and we bought a 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon. It showed up two weeks before we were ready to hit the road in our backyard in Mobile, Alabama. I mean, we're talking this was the infancy of van life. Van life was still not even on the radar. We were lucky.
Shelby Stanger:
What year is this?
Noami Grevemberg:
This is in 2016. We were living all the way down in Louisiana, so we knew no one who had done this and no one who was living in a van. It was really difficult to find a van down there. All the rigs that were even livable were on the west coast. We found a few uninhabitable options, and then a couple with mattresses thrown in the back. We were like, "Well, that's not going to do it." Then we kept searching and we found a Volkswagen bus, which is the epitome of freedom and revolution and radical living. I loved the colors and I loved that it was equipped with the teeny, tiny kitchen.
Noami Grevemberg:
It already had beds, so we were like, "This is the rig that we wanted." We decided to fly to Colorado where there were two that we wanted to test drive, but they were rusted down. They weren't really livable, and we kept looking. Then about two weeks before we hit the road, we found 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon, which is the next level of the Volkswagen iconic buses, the Westfalia, right in our backyard in Mobile, Alabama. It was a family heirloom, well taken care of, and it was the one for us. Again, the universe just, I don't know, it opened up for me.
Shelby Stanger:
That's so cool. You name your van Irie?
Noami Grevemberg:
Irie, yes.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me about the name.
Noami Grevemberg:
Irie means powerful and pleasing. It's a state of mind, like a higher vibration. It's originally from the Caribbean, from Trinidad and Tobago. It's Patois, and it's a very sacred type of word in the Rastafarian culture, and in also my culture. You're walking down the street, somebody say, "Hey, how everything?" It's like, "Everything irie, man." It comes from a place of just humility and gratitude. Right? It's also a state of mind. I feel like that's what I was looking for.
Shelby Stanger:
What was it like growing up on the Caribbean? Were you always outdoorsy? I mean, the natural world is such a big part of island life.
Noami Grevemberg:
Right. Well, I grew up very close to nature, in nature, actually. I grew up in a small fishing village in a rainforest on the island of Trinidad, right, on the Southeastern coast of the island. Nature was my backyard. Every day I woke up in a jungle, howler monkeys in my backyard. My family, they were fishermen their whole life, hunters and fishermen. My mom grew up working on the cocoa plantation and tapping rubber trees as children. That was our life. The idea of the outdoors is really different from what I know here in America. I mean, that was just life. We never called it hiking or backpacking. It was life. Right? Nature is a part of me. It's always been a part of me. I had to adapt to a different way of doing the outdoors here, especially as a Black identifying woman in America, but it will always be a part of me and I will always be a part of it.
Shelby Stanger:
Nature was an essential part of Noami's childhood, but when she was 17 her relationship with the outdoors started to change. She moved to the United States to start her freshman year at the University of New Orleans. During college, she met Dustin at a party and they got married two years later. Even though Noami and Dustin had talked about their dream to travel the country since the day they met, they quickly settled into the status quo. But in 2016, the pair revived the idea of a more nomadic lifestyle and they decided to quit their jobs, or at least they tried to. Dustin seems pretty cool, so he had to quit his job too.
Noami Grevemberg:
Yeah. Well, he actually tried to quit his job, but we were so fortunate. He went in that day, we both actually planned it together. We're like, "We're going in today and we're going to go quit our jobs." Right? I went in, quit my job. He came home and he said, "My boss offered me a remote position." I was so stunned by that, which was really great because we were prepared to try to figure it out. We had a little bit saved. We sold off almost all of our possessions to make extra money for the year of travel, and then he came home and said that his boss offered him a part-time remote position. That was actually such a blessing, because it gave us the space to figure it out.
Shelby Stanger:
The money part is probably the hardest part that people deal with when they make a leap to quit their job and pursue something else. For me, I had saved enough where I was like, "I can make it work," but then I was like, "Oh, it's really hard to make money on your own." Then the hardest part for me, and I don't know about for you, is if something went wrong, I was like, "No, it's you. You're your own boss. You don't have anybody to blame at the water cooler. You are responsible for all victories and all failures."
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, I think that's probably the second hardest thing, besides adapting to a tiny space with a new lifestyle with another person. I think dealing with the uncertainty of finances was really difficult for me. I mean, I was fully dependent on Dustin's job, which was the first time in my life as an adult that I was ever dependent. It was an identity crisis. Let me just go out and say I was going through an identity crisis, but I took that time to really delve deeper into the things that I had put on the back burner, my passion for the outdoors, my passion for writing. I felt a calling to photography. I couldn't afford a good camera, so I bought an adaptable lens for my iPhone. I just started playing around with photos. Not to say that solved all my identity problems or my financial issues, that was still there, but it gave me something to do.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you guys do?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, my partner still works remote as a construction estimator. He also manages Irie to Aurora as a creator platform. We create content in partnership with brands. I'm also a writer, I'm writing my first book. I also work in the DEI space. I do consulting for a few different small companies. I do so much.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you decide when to work and when to not work?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, I am a bit of a workaholic because I love what I do now. I hate using that word, but for me, the idea of blurring the line between work and play has always been the dream. Now I'm able to do that, so sometimes it takes my partner and my dog pulling me away from my computer to go for a walk or to get out of the van or something. They help me a lot, but sometimes I do time chunking, where I work for a few hours and then I play for a few hours. That's helped. I'm a morning person. I feel as a writer, as a creator, I have more energy in the mornings. I'm able to create better and easier in the mornings. Whereas in the afternoons, I'm exhausted, my brain is fried, I need a nap, I'm grumpy, need another cup of coffee. I work in the mornings, mostly.
Shelby Stanger:
Speaking from experience, working for yourself is both a blessing and a curse. You're in charge of your workload and your schedule, which is great, but it's also challenging to wear multiple hats and to force yourself to sit down and work, especially when you're driving around the country in a van, camping in beautiful locations. When we come back, Noami talks about her magical trip to Alaska, the isolation that comes with living on the road and why she started a movement called Diversify Van Life. Noami and Dustin left in 2016 on what was supposed to be a year long trip driving from Louisiana to Alaska. They called their trip Irie to Aurora, after the name of their van, Irie, and the inspiration behind this whole journey, aurora borealis, the Northern Lights. But what started as a planned trip with an end date, quickly morphed into something else, something much bigger. Noami and Dustin have now been living the van life for six years. When did you leave? What month and year did you leave for van life?
Noami Grevemberg:
We left New Orleans on April 16th, 2016. It was supposed to be a one year journey, then back to our regularly scheduled lives. But six months in, we decided that we wanted to continue in van life, continue sustaining this lifestyle, and finally made it to Alaska in July of 2021 last year. I feel like everything that could get in our way got in our way from making it to Alaska, from breakdowns, to the pandemic, to family challenges, things like that. When we finally made it there in September, we decided it's getting cold, but we don't want to leave until we see the aurora. Right? We decided to have one more adventure in Alaska. Before I jump into actually seeing the aurora, I have dreamt of Alaska ever since I was a little girl growing up in Trinidad.
Noami Grevemberg:
I used to watch National Geographic documentaries on my parents small black and white television with the bunny ears and just be so stunned, and just so awestruck that a place like Alaska existed. It was always a dream that I had. When I came to America, I brought that dream with me. It's like, "Someday I'm going to do that," but in the process of growing, right, life and becoming an adult, that dream got buried along with my dream of visiting all the national parks and so many other things. For that dream to finally come to fruition, I was just in awe. I remember that night in Fairbanks, Alaska, standing on top of Irie's rooftop and looking up at the sky, the aurora borealis just dancing, it was beautiful. It was beautiful.
Shelby Stanger:
It's so cool that you can be so touched by nature. I'm just imagining, growing up in the Caribbean, how radical Alaska would be.
Noami Grevemberg:
So radical. My parents were just ... My family, my sisters, every day they would message me, "Oh, my God. What did you see? What happening there? What's Alaska like? They were just so stoked for me.
Shelby Stanger:
To get into the nitty gritty a little bit, how do you guys decide where you're going next or how long you're going to stay, all that stuff?
Noami Grevemberg:
Dustin and I don't really plan too much ahead. Like I said, van life is really unpredictable. We live close to the elements, so we like to follow the warmth. 75 degrees and sunny is the ideal climate for us living in a van, especially an old tin can like ours. Right? We don't really have much insulation, so we try to be in the ideal, comfortable climate, so wherever it's warm is where we go. We also practice slow travel, which means that we like to stay in a place for a while. If we're in Zion area, we'll stick around here for a couple of weeks, or maybe a month, and just learn the place. Right?
Noami Grevemberg:
Immerse ourselves in local community, eat at the local restaurants, visit the coffee shops in the libraries, make friends, hike the trails, go swimming in the rivers. That sort of travel helps us to find some kind of, I guess, routine in a lifestyle where it's really unpredictable. Slow travel is usually how we roll. Sometimes we will plan, like if it's a road trip say, or we're going to go on a vacation and turn off our phones, but beyond that it's mostly following 75 and sunny, the ideal climate.
Shelby Stanger:
75 and sunny sounds pretty perfect to me. I'm a little envious that Noami and Dustin can just follow the good weather, or seek out an adventure, or go somewhere new just because, but van life isn't all warm weather and perfect landscapes. Living in 80 square feet with your partner and a large dog can be challenging. There's not a lot of personal space or alone time. Even so, it can still be really lonely. Being on the road for really long times seems like it could get lonely. How was it for you guys during the pandemic?
Noami Grevemberg:
That was a really tough time. Well, early van life, we felt like something was missing. Right? I mean, we left our home in New Orleans, our community, our friends, our family. New Orleans is the greatest city in the world. We were never bored. Most of the people that we were meeting on the road were retirees living in their RVs. We didn't really know that #vanlife was actually a thing, right, nor did we know anyone that was living this lifestyle. It was really isolating for us. Even though we were together, even though I had a partner and he had me, we still felt really lonely. It was just something that we couldn't shake. That was the big thing that had us wondering if this was something that we could continue doing, because it was a lot.
Noami Grevemberg:
We were going through a lot of other changes, like jumping into a new lifestyle, right, quitting our jobs, the identity crisis, things like that. Then we saw online that there was a van life gathering in Bend, Oregon. We never heard of a van gathering. Like, "Oh, wow. An event of humans that live in vans. That's a thing?" That was the first time we found community on the road. Of course, we packed up everything and drove 24 hours, 48 hours from Yellowstone all the way to Bend, Oregon for this event. It changed our life on the road.
Shelby Stanger:
I feel like Oregon is the Mecca for that kind of stuff, because I was there and there was this huge van life gathering in 2017 or 2018 that I went to. It was so cute.
Noami Grevemberg:
Oh, wow.
Shelby Stanger:
Were you the only woman of color at this gathering though? I'm just curious.
Noami Grevemberg:
I and another woman, she is Indigenous. We're good friends now. She's Dakota Sioux, and we were both the only women of color there.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you talk about that? What's it like being a woman of color who does van life? Because that isn't something that was out there, most of the people that I know who live in vans were white dudes.
Noami Grevemberg:
Right, pretty much. That's what I mostly met on the journey. It was isolating, for sure. It was scary at times, but I'm fortunate that I travel with Dustin. I took advantage of his white male privilege for sure, especially when it came to police encounters. It was an isolating time, for sure.
Shelby Stanger:
Have you met more ... I mean, with Diversified Van Life, you've had to have met so many more people.
Noami Grevemberg:
Oh, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
There are more people doing it now. Cool.
Noami Grevemberg:
We out here. We out here. We out here.
Shelby Stanger:
Let's talk about Diversify Van Life. What was the moment you decided to start it? Can you talk about the collaborative nature of the platform?
Noami Grevemberg:
Well, Diversify Van Life got started out of frustration. Right? It was the summer of 2019 and we were going to all these van life events. I mean, stoke levels were so high for that summer. We were all just connecting and building community, attending all these community events and such, but the missing piece was that I didn't see any people of color. I was one-off the only one at most van life events. That really started taking a toll on me, because the stories that I was hearing were all the same. They didn't resonate with me. They were very privileged, some of them. That's valid for who you are. Everyone's story is valid, but it did not include other people that I knew were living on the margins of this lifestyle.
Noami Grevemberg:
Was I the only Black identifying woman? Was I the only BIPOC living van life? Absolutely not. I was not the only one. It took a toll on me at a van life event in Taos, New Mexico, where a community town hall conversation was about van life in the media, and the stories that were being told and the romanticization of the lifestyle. That is a fact, but the idea was that we have no control over the media, and that's not necessarily true. We were controlling the media. We were controlling the narrative that were out there because we were perpetuating that narrative by excluding voices from people from our community. They were excluded. They were marginalized and they were isolated from telling their stories, because they weren't allowed.
Noami Grevemberg:
Their stories weren't being amplified. They weren't pass the mic. It was all exclusive. At that point, there was these two men in there, white men, and they dominated the conversation. Even though there were other people, many women, who were trying to speak, and they weren't allowed to speak. One of the men mentioned, "If you just walk upright in the world and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, everything is going to work out for you." I'm there thinking, how are you going to walk upright in the world when you got oppression on your shoulders every day? Right? That was the last straw. I walked out of that room livid. I turned around and I saw some of my friends walk out the room with the same look of exasperation on their faces.
Noami Grevemberg:
We walked over to my van, I cried out of rage and decided to do something about it. I decided to speak up. I was terrified, but a week later on a social media post I spoke the truth about the van life community and the lack of representation and the harmful dangerous narratives that are being put out into the world, because it's perpetuating stereotypes. It's creating barriers to entry for people like me. Then I started the #DiversifyVanLife. The hashtag then turned into an Instagram platform because people were asking for it. I was actually pretty shocked of how much people would mobilize around the idea of Diversify Van Life, but they did. I decided to turn it into a social media platform, and now it's a community organization.
Shelby Stanger:
What started as a hashtag in 2019 has become an incredible resource for BIPOC and LGBTQ people who want to get outside. In 2021, the community created the BIPOC Guide to Van Life and the Outdoors. The guide offers tips and advice for people who want to try van life, but who haven't necessarily felt welcome in that space and want more information. They also have a podcast called Nomads at the Intersection. Noami isn't only hustling to make a living as a digital nomad, but she's also working to make this space more accessible and welcoming. It's hard work, but she's happy to do it for a community she plans to be part of for a very long time. Are you feeling like van life is the place for you for the foreseeable future?
Noami Grevemberg:
Yeah. I don't see an end in sight, to be honest with you. I really love this lifestyle. It's freeing in ways that I could not have imagined. It's hard. It keeps me on my toes. It's uncomfortable, and I like that. I like unpredictability and I like changing environments and meeting new people and trying different things. What is life for?
Shelby Stanger:
Noami bucked the norm, and left behind a life she thought she was supposed to have. What she found on the road was adventurous, challenging, and freeing. Don't be afraid to leave behind a life that's weighing you down for a life that just might lift you up. Noami, thank you so much for the conversation and for sharing your beautiful story and lessons with me. You can follow Noami at Irietoaurora.com and Irietoaurora on Instagram. That's I-R-I-E-T-O-A-U-R-O-R-A. You can also check out Diversify Van Life at Diversifyvanlife.com, and on Instagram at Diversify.vanlife. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative, and her senior producer is Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.