When a work trip brought us to Maui to appear on a podcast, it seemed to only make sense to add more days to our itinerary to explore the island ourselves. After all, just getting to the island involved a four-hour flight, followed by a four and a half hour layover, followed by another five-hour flight. We stayed up for 25 hours straight to normalize ourselves to the new time zone before crashing hard in our new home for the next four days—a 1998 Dodge Ram 1500 rental van nicknamed Green Machine #2.
Opting for this short-term experiment in van life turned out to be the best decision we made—with four wheels under our bed, we weren’t tied down to one Airbnb or hotel room that we had to get back to every night, which allowed us to explore the island to the fullest over a relatively short trip.
We didn't feel like we sacrificed anything, either. Inside Green Machine #2, there were two mattresses in the main cabin, storage for our camera gear, a cooler for our food, a shower mounted to the roof, a standalone battery to charge our equipment, and a slide-out stove in the back of the van. It was everything we needed for four days.