Cooking Pancakes out of my 4Runner | SUV Camping Q&A

Good morning! It is July 4th at 7 32 a.m and today I will be making pancakes and answering all the questions that you have about road life. This includes camping, traveling, the build, whatever. It's all fair game and yes I know I look like I aged about 50 years overnight. That's what living on the road does to you. So let's get started. Pancake time! Are you ready? All the questions right here. Let's get started. First up, hardest place to find camping so far. Portland. I did not enjoy Portland. I just felt a little unsafe there and I didn't really like camping there and it was just hard to find camping so definitely Portland. Okay up next on the list, best camp spot so far. Well that depends on how you define best because some people want internet, some people want groups, some people want solitude. I would have to go with the spot that I stayed at in Grand Teton with Mark. Shout out to Mark, you were awesome. Thanks for letting me stay at your spot and I just thought the spot at the Grand Tetons had awesome views and good company and I just really enjoyed being there. All right, favorite place, Montana in general. I just loved Montana. I liked the people there. I liked what you could do. There were so many activities and it was just beautiful in general. So Montana is my favorite place so far on this trip. All right, next question. Best part of having a four-runner. This one is easy. It is super stealthy and I can camp anywhere. Okay so I have a dilemma. This is about the amount of pancake mix I want to use but I have just a little bit left in this bag so I'm gonna be extra hungry today. Yay! All right, yeah so going back to the four-runner and being super stealthy. So my four-runner is 100% stock right now which means that nobody really knows unless they see this that I actually live in it full-time. So I can get away with a lot of camp spots that van lifers and smaller RVs can't which is so nice. All right, biggest daily challenge. Also am I adding more chocolate chips to my dark chocolate pancakes? Of course I am. Anyways, biggest daily challenge. Finding someplace to wash my face. I have to wash my face two times a day. It's my thing. I just, it makes me feel clean and it's really hard to find some place to inconspicuously carry in my face wash and not feel super self-conscious or like I'm mooching off of a business. So yeah, definitely finding a place to wash my face. Okay, I'm doing a really bad job of multitasking. I'm kind of forgetting about my pancakes. Favorite part of the road so far. I've talked about this one before. It's no surprise. I just love the people. Meeting people, hearing their stories, it's the best. It is by far my favorite part of the road. I say that the reason I'm still on the road and why I stay on the road is because of the people and I'm not sure that will ever change even though I've only been on the road five weeks, six weeks in the 4Runner and six months before that in the trailer. Mix. Okay, this is turning out pretty well. It's a good thing because I don't really have extra mix to add if I screwed up the ratios. Do I measure things? No. It takes too much time and energy. Oh, I didn't mix the bottom. Whoops. Okay, next question. One thing that I would change about the build. This is also an easy question. I would add in more security features because I have a lot of electronics and it just makes me nervous leaving my car for any extended amount of time. So, I would definitely add in some more features to accommodate all my electronics and stuff that I want to lock up. I'm gonna have burnt pancakes if I put them on right now. It's so hot. Okay. Alright, number one thing I look for in campsites. That it just doesn't give me the creeps. If I have a good feeling going to a campsite, I'll probably stay there but there are some campsites that I pull up to and I'm just like no and I leave because if it gives me the creeps and my gut tells me no, then I just follow my gut. I don't really look for internet service. I have a satellite communicator if I need to tell my family where I'm at for the evening. I just don't want to be scared of where I'm staying. Top place that I recommend people visit. So far along my trip, I would have to say Bend, Oregon. There's so much to do in Bend. My favorite thing there was floating the river. It was awesome to meet everybody and sizzle and I just think that Bend is a really great place to visit if you need a new place. Although the Bend, the locals to Bend might hate me for pushing Bend more because I think that there's already a lot of people there. Coolest place I have been so far, Yellowstone and not for the reasons that most people would think. So a lot of people are like Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic Spring and yeah saw all those people, Bison, Bison yeah saw all those things, saw all those places. I thought Yellowstone was cool because it just doesn't seem real. Like you're walking around and then three feet from the boardwalk is this giant hole that leads to seemingly nothing and you know it's terrifying and it would absolutely consume your entire body and not even think twice about it. And to me that's just so cool that that exists. It's terrifying but cool. Okay pancakes are on the griddle so now I'm waiting. Weirdest camping experience so far. Okay so on night two of this whole adventure I was in Utah at Flaming Gorge at a dispersed camping site called Jug Hollow and I found a really cool spot by the river. There were quite a few people there but I didn't mind because everybody had their own little areas. Anyways it was about 3 30 or 4 in the morning and out of nowhere I just heard this super loud man yell out another guy's name. I think it was like David or something and so he just yelled David at the top of his lungs and it woke me up and I did not sleep after that because that was all I could think about. It was just David. Oh my god I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I don't know why I was so freaked out but yeah that was the weirdest experience so far. It was BLM land too. All right biggest pet peeve about stealth campings. Biggest pet peeve about stealth camping in cities. All right so I have a feeling most people would say road noise but I'm not going to say road noise. I am going to say off-level camping spots which happens a lot in cities because think about how a road is made. It's crowned maybe not as dramatically as this but it's definitely crowned and so where I park on the side it's off level which sometimes doesn't seem like a lot until you lay down and you're practically falling off the platform to the side. So that's my biggest pet peeve. I always try and find a level spot because I can't exactly use the little cube things that you can drive up onto to make a spot level if I'm camping on a street. That would give me away pretty fast. How easy is it to meet other van lifers? Surprisingly easy or not so surprisingly because I'm in a lot of cities that have a lot of people who do van life or road life but I will say you generally have to be the first person to make contact. Have I had any bad or unsafe experiences camping thus far? Nope I haven't. I've been really lucky I guess if you want to say lucky but like I said before I generally trust my gut and so I don't pick spots that I think I'm going to have issues in so no I haven't had any issues so far. What is my power setup? I'll show you. Goal zero. Yeti 3000. So these pancakes got a little toasty. Whoops. Most common places I sleep. In parking lots, along streets, that's pretty much it. I do spend a little time on BLM land and I camp in forests occasionally but for the most part I'm along streets or in parking lots. It's just convenient and easy and with gas prices as high as they are I don't want to do a bunch of driving so I like to stay close by the grocery stores and Starbucks. And most valuable part of my build, the tables. I use them all the time for everything. All right so pancakes are pretty good. I'll give them an eight and a half out of ten. They are cooked through and through without losing moisture and they have good flavor. Anyways this concludes all the questions for today. If you have more leave them down below and I will happily answer them or find me on Instagram, no perfect plan. I hope you have a good one guys.