Marlene and Dan Lin have been living on the road full-time for the past 17 years. Alongside their three children and two cats, they’ve driven across the U.S. multiple times, explored over 30 countries in Europe, and road-tripped from California to Patagonia via the Pan-American Highway. What began as a short-term adventure turned into a lifestyle they never anticipated—nearly two decades of life in a camper van.
Marlene and Dan Lin have been living on the road full-time for the past 17 years. Alongside their three children and two cats, they’ve driven across the U.S. multiple times, explored over 30 countries in Europe, and road-tripped from California to Patagonia via the Pan-American Highway. What began as a short-term adventure turned into a lifestyle they never anticipated—nearly two decades of life in a camper van.
Connect with Marlene & Dan:
Thank you to our sponsors:
Marlene Lin:
We found both of ourselves working from home. And since we were both at home, home doesn't need to be a house, home can be anywhere. Let's make the road our home in our trailer for a little bit and see how it works out.
Shelby Stanger:
For the past 17 years, Marlene and Dan Lin have been living on the road full time. The two of them, their three children, and two cats have driven across the US multiple times, traveled through more than 30 countries in Europe. And even road tripped from California to Patagonia on the Pan-American Highway. When the family set out on their first road trip, they never expected that they'd still be living out of a camper nearly 20 years later. What started as a simple experiment has become a lifestyle that they wouldn't trade for anything. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Dan and Marlene Lin, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I love talking to wild families. I mean, the whole family is wild.
Dan Lin:
And a couple cats, a couple wild cats. Those are probably the wildest of the family.
Shelby Stanger:
For those who are unaware of the two of you and the wild way you've decided to live your life, will you guys just introduce yourselves, please?
Marlene Lin:
Hi, I'm Marlene.
Dan Lin:
And I'm Dan. And we are known on social media as Mali Mish. We've been traveling full-time on the road since 2008. We first started out with just our oldest and now we have three kids and we've adopted two cats since we've been on the road. And actually our oldest, who was less than 1 when we started is now 18 and she is on her way to college.
Shelby Stanger:
So I want to hear the love story. How did you two meet?
Dan Lin:
Well, I saw her freshman year in the dorms. She was wearing a knee brace from an unfortunate dancing accident down in Mexico during spring break.
Shelby Stanger:
Dancing accident in Mexico. That sounds like a wild story of a different kind.
Dan Lin:
Yeah, yeah, we were going to Mexico for different reasons back then.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so you two met at UCSB, and have you always had a sense of adventure or did you cultivate it in college? Where did that come from? Did you grow up adventurous? Did you grow up camping or traveling in a van?
Dan Lin:
I grew up overseas. I grew up from when I was born until I was 12, I lived in Taiwan. And we didn't really go camping. I was just a city kid. But when I moved to California at the age of 12, I was really excited and I think we did a lot of road trips and I kind of got into camping, off-roading. When I was in high school, I had a little Jeep, so we would drive up to the mountains, go off-road, hang out with some friends.
Shelby Stanger:
And Marlene, what about you?
Marlene Lin:
I did not grow up camping either. I grew up in the port of LA that happened to have a lot of Croatian immigrants. Both of my parents are Croatian and they immigrated in the '60s, and so they spent their time here trying to build a new life. And so we didn't grow up as a typical whole American family going camping, renting RVs, things like that. Every time we went on vacation, we tried to go back to Croatia and eventually do little trips here and there as a family in California or Arizona. That was our big adventure in the US.
Shelby Stanger:
What was your first adventure together?
Dan Lin:
Well, with my Jeep that I had in high school, so I had that Jeep all through college too, so I was one of the few guys in our group of friends that had a car. I'm a surfer. I love being by the ocean and being in Santa Barbara was great. But also, even back then being poor college students were like, it was the best place to go surf, and eat, and hang out. So we ended up going down to Baja a whole bunch back in those days. So this is-
Marlene Lin:
That was our first trip together. We went to outside of Ensenada and a little surf village called San Miguel.
Dan Lin:
Yeah, plus San Miguel was our spot.
Shelby Stanger:
On those trips to Baja, Dan and Marlene learned that they traveled well together. Despite their adventurous nature, the two settled into a pretty typical lifestyle after graduating. They rented a house together and landed jobs in the tech industry. Like a lot of young couples, Dan and Marlene were focused on building their careers and starting a family. For a while, things seemed like they were falling into place. They bought a home and had their first child. When they took a step back though, they didn't feel quite as content as they'd expected.
Dan Lin:
We were like, "Wow, this is pretty rough. We're both working and we have this baby we have to take care of, and all we want to do is spend time with her. And instead, we're both going to work and we're taking her and dropping her off at daycare so we can go make money. And most of our money from one of the income just goes to pay for that. So why are we doing this?" In 2004, I had gone and become a freelancer, so I'm a web developer, so I can work from anywhere even back in those days as long as the internet was good. So I have been working on my own for a good two, three years at the time. And we just realized, we don't have to take our kid to daycare. We don't have to sit in an office or even sit at home and work.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so Marlene, what were you doing at the time where you could also quit your job?
Marlene Lin:
I was working for a medical device company that was a startup, and it was going very well until all the money ran out. The company burned like $60 million, and so they closed their doors. And then the companies that worked with my company offered me freelance work. So we found both of ourselves working from home and since we were both at home, let's make the road our home in our trailer for a little bit and see how it works out and we can spend all our time with our kids.
Dan Lin:
And this is a time when that idea wasn't so obvious. So we started looking for a camper. We went to go see this little teardrop camper thing because we thought, "Oh yeah, we don't need a lot of space. It's just the three of us." And then at this dealership, we saw the camper that we were looking for, but it was also an Airstream dealership, so there were just a sea of Airstreams. And we didn't know anything about Airstream at the time, so we're like, "What are those?"
Shelby Stanger:
Shiny.
Marlene Lin:
Yeah, they're pretty cool.
Dan Lin:
Yeah. And then we looked at the price tag and we're like, "Okay, maybe a little later." Our mentality at the beginning was just like, let's just get a camper and go do some camping. It was never like, we're going to sell everything and just leave the world behind and just travel the world. What we tell people how this lifestyle started and how it evolved to where it is now is that we started making kind of small circles, the kind of concentric circles that kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
Shelby Stanger:
With their teardrop trailer and 10-month-old baby, Dan and Marlene headed down to Arizona for a couple of months. Their house sat empty while they worked remotely, explored, and spent time together as a family. The adventure itself was a success. The camper, however, wasn't quite right. Teardrop trailers are pretty small with no space for anything other than sleeping. The setup was a little too bare bones for their family of three. Still, the trip planted a seed. A few months later during the 2008 financial crisis, Dan and Marlene came across an ad for an Airstream at a dealership that was going out of business. They'd lept at the opportunity and started to spend more time on the road.
Dan Lin:
The first couple years we stayed fairly local.
Marlene Lin:
We stayed local and we keep our house. Because at that point, we knew we wanted to have three kids, I think. And then we wanted a place close that we can have doctor visits. Everybody does it differently, but we felt comfortable to having that house. Financially, it wasn't a good idea to keep an empty house while we traveled.
Dan Lin:
Yeah, we were paying mortgage, we're paying insurance, we're paying utility just so that we could have a place to go to if something did happen.
Shelby Stanger:
Smart.
Dan Lin:
And also, I think part of it was financial crisis. I think it wasn't just a time for you to just sell your house, so we didn't do it the way like a lot of people today maybe would have done, which is sell everything and just deal with it. We kept that house and then all three of our kids were actually born at the same hospital.
Shelby Stanger:
So once you had two kids, you start traveling across the country?
Dan Lin:
Yeah. So our first cross country trip was with our two girls. So Mila was five months old when we went across country to Florida, and that was our first time going across the country. So this would've been 2010, I think.
Marlene Lin:
Yeah.
Dan Lin:
Right? And we thought at this time, we've been traveling for a couple of years. We're like, okay, let's just go cross country, go to Florida and we'll go check out what the Florida Keys are all about and this will be our big trip. And then maybe this will, once we come back, we'll be done. And then we go, and it only got worse. We saw all these places and we went to Florida, we went down to the Keys, and we found some of the best Florida State Park campgrounds that we've ever been to. We're like, okay, we have to come back. From that point on, it was like, okay, so now we've seen all these places down here, and we did this in the winter, so maybe we need to go see some more places up north in the summer. So for the next, I don't know, 2010 to 2015, '16-ish, we traveled all over the US.
We drove to 49 states, obviously Florida for that first cross country trip. And then we ended up going to Alaska in 2015 with the Airstream also. And in 2015, driving all the way to Alaska, that was the last state that we could drive to. Obviously, we can't drive to Hawaii. But going to Alaska was one of the eye opening experiences that made us realize that, okay, this is the last state that we're visiting with our vehicle, with our camper, but we are not ready to be done. We want to see more. And in fact, going to Alaska made us realize that there's so much more that we can't do with this big trailer. We have to downsize. So we downsized to a four-wheel camper similar to the one that we're in now, and the kids were obviously smaller then. And we felt that we fit just fine in here and people thought we were crazy that we were going to go all pack in this little truck camper and just go.
Shelby Stanger:
While being on the road satisfied Dan and Marlene's wanderlust, it also came with some real trade-offs, especially for the three young kids. There were no soccer leagues, no daycares, no summer camps, and no traditional school. Dan and Marlene had always assumed they'd settle down once it was time for their oldest daughter to start kindergarten, but they found a way to keep going.
You have these little kids that you're taking around. Are you homeschooling them?
Marlene Lin:
We are.
Dan Lin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Marlene Lin:
We never had plans to homeschool our kids. When it was time for our oldest, Ava, to go kindergarten, we were going to stop and put her in public school and live a typical life. Because it's just like society keeps telling you, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, especially coming from immigrant families and Dan being immigrant, there's this American dream and you're supposed to have this house and have this picket fence. But we changed what the American dream was for ourselves.
Dan Lin:
Also, like a lot of immigrants, they came to the US to have a better life. They came to the US because of the opportunities. To think that you're going to live in a car after your parents came to try to give you a better life was something that didn't compute for them. But one of the things I think that made our life like this work without having a lot of conflict with our family is actually that we never really told them at the beginning that we're going to do this. And part of that is also because we never knew that we were going to do this for as long as we did, so there was nothing to tell.
So when we did, we started sharing stuff on our blog, taking pictures and sending them to our family. They kind of learned about what we were doing as we were doing it. And then they realized, well, what they're doing is actually really cool. So we didn't give them a chance to get scared about this. "We were just going to Arizona." "Oh, cool, have fun." "We're going to do a three-month cross-country drive to Florida." "Okay, have fun." And after they saw how much fun and how cool this was and how much the kids were learning being on the road, they were actually very excited. So we never had that pushback from our family that was like, "You shouldn't do this. You should get jobs and do all that."
Shelby Stanger:
I love that because I always tell people the first step in pursuing a wild idea is to say it out loud and tell someone that it makes it real. But maybe the first step sometimes should be just doing the wild idea, not telling anybody and actually taking the step to do it. You don't have to tell other people, especially if they're going to shut you down.
Marlene Lin:
Yeah.
Dan Lin:
Right. There are a lot of people who will tell you to not do something. And I think it does make it harder, it does make it more challenging if you have a lot of those kinds of people in your life. But I think like a lot of things, showing is better than telling. But like I was saying before, we thought we would be done after Arizona initially, but we loved it. So we kept going. We thought we'd be done after Florida. We loved it, we kept going. And then we thought we'd actually be done five years into this life. We thought, okay, now our oldest, she has to go to school, she has to go to kindergarten. So we actually thought that we would stop in 2012. We went so far as to get a job. So I got a job where I wasn't freelancing anymore. And we went so far as buying a house.
So we had sold our house in Ventura after a few years. After we had our third kid we realized, okay, we don't need a house there anymore. But then we're like, "Oh, okay, maybe we should stop because we have to..." Because we're not educators by training. We're just parents. And we thought, we don't know what we're doing. We're going to screw our kids up. So we decided that, okay, maybe we'll send them to normal school or traditional school. And then we bought a house in the city where Marlene grew up and we parked Airstream outside. We brought some of our stuff inside this empty house. That first night, we all slept in the same room with all these other spaces empty, and we're like, "What are we doing?"
Marlene Lin:
We continue to sleep with that same wreck.
Dan Lin:
This is not working. So we rented the house out and then we just kept going.
Marlene Lin:
And that's we decided to give homeschooling a try. So Ava's in kindergarten, somehow you saw an ad for a charter school, which allows you to homeschool, and they'll guide you. They'll hold your hand. You have a teacher, you check in with your teacher every 20 school days, make sure you're on track. And it's like, okay, if somebody's holding your hand and it's a charter school, we can do this. We can give it a try. It's kindergarten. How hard can it be?
Dan Lin:
So it was because of that school that we enrolled her in that made us feel like we could do it. So after a couple of years of that, we're like, okay, now our middle kid needs to go to school, let's do the same. Let's just keep going. So there's all these very opportune moments that happen along the way that made us keep going. And any one of these situations could have been the end of our life on the road, but for whatever reason, it's not like we didn't make these decisions ourselves. To give ourselves some credit, we did choose to keep going. But it's a lot of dedication, but there's also some luck along the way.
Shelby Stanger:
The homeschooling program Dan and Marlene chose, turned out to be a perfect fit for their kids. Perhaps the best part was that the curriculum included a lot of material about national parks. As the family traveled around the US, they visited those parks, learning about history, biology, geology, and politics. After a few years driving around the Americas, Dan and Marlene dreamt of going farther afield, to Europe. In order to make van life feasible there, they bought a four-by-four Sprinter van. They spent about six months building it out themselves before shipping it overseas.
Dan Lin:
So since 2018 until this year, we're all living in a 2017 Mercedes Sprinter van. It's four-wheel drive, 170 wheelbase, and we bought it as a, what's called a crew van. Which means, that just means that it has a second row of seats that's factory. We wanted to do that because we wanted to make sure that it had crash tested seat belts and safety features and all that. So we built that out with sort of a galley in the middle. So sink and stove on one side, countertop. On the opposite side, next to the sliding door is the fridge and some food storage.
And then in the back, we built bunk beds. So we have a bed on the top, was a queen-sized bed, and the bottom is the full-sized bed. And we made it so that they're not beds that convert, they're always ready. And we sleep on the bottom on a full-sized bed, it's 48 inches wide. And the kids sleep on the top and it's a little over, I think it's 62 inches wide or something like that. So this is when they first started living in that thing was seven years ago. So they were 11, 8, and 5, much smaller. So that space was a lot bigger then.
Marlene Lin:
Once again, we weren't planning to go more than a year or two in that van. We were probably going to stop again, who knows?
Dan Lin:
So they all slept up there. So I kind of described this as a frog in a pot of boiling water, like, "Oh no, we totally fit." But then as they're living in it, they got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, taller, and taller, and taller.
Marlene Lin:
What's happening?
Dan Lin:
And then by the beginning of this year as we're down in the bottom of Argentina, we're like, "Wow, you guys are all adult-sized people pretty much." And I think this is the last few months that we can fit in this thing before something has to change. So there's no sort of other reference point of like, "Oh, I want to have a room where I can shut the door and just be in there by myself." So they're used to being next to their siblings, being next to their parents. If they have questions, they can just ask. So they're super open with us. They have any questions that we can kind of see if there's any things bothering them, so things don't kind of fester and simmer. So we work stuff out right away. It's also made the kids really close, which is actually kind of sad because our oldest is going to college in September, and that'll be the first time that she's going to be gone from us for that long. And we don't quite know how we're going to deal with it, but we'll figure it out.
Marlene Lin:
Well, we know we're going to park outside her dorm until [inaudible 00:21:17].
Shelby Stanger:
She's going to love that.
Dan Lin:
Yeah. She kind of does.
Marlene Lin:
She actually asked us to stick around Santa Barbara-
Shelby Stanger:
That's so sweet.
Marlene Lin:
... [inaudible 00:21:25] we'll figure it out together.
Shelby Stanger:
While the van makes for pretty close quarters, Dan, Marlene, and their kids have figured out how to make it work. On a typical day, everyone needs to do some level of studying or computer time. So the family has carved out plenty of spots to set up a workstation. The mini fridge doubles as a standing desk. A bed is a perfect spot for Zoom calls, and there's almost always a picnic table outside. Flexibility is a key part of their lifestyle, and they've learned to adapt to each unique location. While they were in Europe, the family traveled to almost 40 countries. They anticipated being there for a year, maybe two, but ended up staying for much longer.
Dan Lin:
In Europe, it's really tough to try to find 70 degree weather year round. So in the winter time, you have to go south, you have to go pretty far south. So one of the winters, the second winter we were there and it was 2020, so I think maybe you know where this is going. And we go to Morocco. So we go down to the bottom of Spain, we take the ferry across to Morocco, easy trip actually. People do this every year. Morocco is kind of like Europe's Baja. People go down there to go surf. People go down there for the cuisine, for the friendly locals, and the cheap stuff. And COVID was starting to happen. As we're driving across from Croatia over across to Spain, Europe gets their first case of COVID in Northern Italy. And we're like, well, let's keep going, let's just kind of outrun this. But we cross into Morocco and then we felt like, okay, now there's a body of water between us, so it's harder for this virus to come across.
But we ended up getting stuck in Morocco when they closed the border about two months into our trip in Morocco. And we were down near the bottom, near the town of Agadir when they announced that there's no traveling on the highways. We literally hung out there for two weeks. And then just the day they announced that Spain was closing their borders from everyone in Morocco, like Europeans included. We're able to drive all night up to the border. But unfortunately, we got there at 9:00 PM. Even though the border didn't close till midnight, they were already closed. So we were stuck in Morocco waiting for a rescue ferry to come get all these 500 campers that were stuck there.
So the Moroccans were amazing. They had this parking lot that they were still building outside of the port of Tangier. And they moved all of us over there, all 500 campers. And overnight, they brought in a couple of containers that were portable buildings. One was a little grocery store, one was a little bakery. They brought in electrical outlets. They build electrical outlets all the way around the campers so we could all plug in and charge. And they had water-
Marlene Lin:
A sewer system.
Dan Lin:
... sewer system, and they did all of this for all of us for free.
Marlene Lin:
There was a fence around us and we couldn't leave without permission.
Dan Lin:
Yeah. So we were lucky because we were there. And Marlene is dual citizen, she has dual citizenship in Croatia with the kids too. She was able to get it for the kids. And since I'm her spouse, I was able to get residency in the EU. So because of that, we were able to stay there and wait for the rescue ferry that would only take people that were EU citizens or residents. So even though we're stuck there for two weeks, eventually we did get out.
Shelby Stanger:
So you spent the pandemic mostly in Spain?
Dan Lin:
We spent the pandemic mostly in Europe.
Marlene Lin:
In Croatia.
Dan Lin:
Yeah. When we got back to Europe on the rescue ferry, we drove from France all the way to Croatia. And then we spent basically the next year in Croatia, in the stone house on the island where Marlene's dad grew up.
Shelby Stanger:
After spending four years in Europe, Dan and Marlene decided to come back to the Americas and continue their adventures. They recently returned to the US from a couple of years traveling on the Pan-American Highway, driving all the way from California down to Argentina and Chile. Now they're back in California to support their oldest daughter as she starts her freshman year in college. Meanwhile, Dan and Marlene are building on a new truck camper for off-road adventures as they adjust to having four people on the road rather than five.
Any advice on people traveling on the road like in a van or truck?
Dan Lin:
I think the biggest thing is that people should slow down. People should spend more time in places that may not seem like there's anything to see, but if you just dig a little deeper, every place has something interesting about it. When we travel with our friends who are working traditional jobs, living in a house, and sometimes we'll be like, "Hey, you guys have a couple week vacation. Let's go do something." And their thought is always, "Well, let's just drive two straight days to Wyoming so we can spend a week there and then drive two days back." It's like, "Why don't you guys just enjoy the road along the way? You don't have to spend the majority of your vacation at that destination." Because really it is what they say, the journey is part of the adventure.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you hope people know about this lifestyle that you lead?
Marlene Lin:
For me, we're just regular people. We didn't have these crazy aspirations, like right away we're going to go to Everest. We just like to hang out. We don't have-
Dan Lin:
We're just a couple of chill dudes. Well, I think it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, that every time you get to a place, the next place seems a little easier. And if you just keep keeping that mentality, you cross the border into the next country, see what that's like. And once you get familiar with that area, you know what? The border on the other side isn't as scary as you once thought. And by that frame of mind, anybody from anywhere, as long as you can have the means to kind of make it happen, you have the time. You have maybe the resources to be able to do it. We're lucky to be able to have that, have remote jobs. And I think a lot more people have that these days than there ever has been, that you can just get to the other side of the border and figure out how to cross it. And then you do that enough times, eventually you'll go all the way around the world before you even know it. And that's essentially what happened to us.
Marlene Lin:
Yeah. And you don't have to be independently wealthy. To live on the road, we don't need nearly as much money as a typical family. We can survive off of a small income.
Dan Lin:
It's way more expensive to be in Southern California for us right now.
Marlene Lin:
Yeah, we don't have a mortgage. We don't have utility bills. Our mortgage is our gas. And if we decide not to drive that week, we're not paying anything.
Shelby Stanger:
Dan and Marlene actually recorded this interview in their latest four-by-four camper. To see a screenshot of their setup, you can check out the REI blog post for this episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. You can also see more about what they're up to on their Instagram @mali.mish. That's M-A-L-I dot M-I-S-H. You can also see photos of all of Dan and Marlene's camper vehicles over the years and stay up to date with them on their blog at malimish.com. Once again, that's M-A-L-I-M-I-S-H.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show. Take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.