Professional MODEL leaves BEVERLY HILLS to LIVE in a VAN
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Philippe Leblond is a professional model from Montreal based in Los Angeles, although when we had the chance to meet up with him he was travelling around Squamish BC in Canada. He’s been traveling for 12 years living out of a suitcase for work. Just before turning 30 he decided to buy a van. He took a trip from LA to Vancouver by every national park. It was on that trip that he became fully addicted to the freedom of the van life. Three years later, he’s still living in it, and now he’s in Canada falling in love with his own country. For Philippe, his van is his bedroom and the world is his living room, all you really need in life is food water and a bed at night. He originally built his van as a weekend van and ended up living in it, so there’s a few considerations that he wished he’d thought of when he first built it, like putting in electricity first thing, like a solar panel with a second battery, because he cannot charge his computer or his drone or run a fridge at the moment. That’ll probably be his next upgrade.
It's Ford e350 Super Duty 2011 with 93,000 miles on it. He hasn't been in the garage yet in the past three years of owning it, but he did do some modifications. The bumper was chrome and it looked really bad so he went to see a guy. He was going to charge him $400 bucks to paint it so he decided to go to a store to buy himself a little spray paint, he thinks it better now.
Sadly the van is not a 4x4, he’s got stuck a couple times but it's part of van life. As soon as you get out of your comfort zone, that's where adventure starts and when you get stuck you have a little half second of panic, but then deal with it. He could’ve tried getting it converted to 4x4, but that would cost $16,000, so he decided to put all terrain tires on instead.
He wanted to have the roof rack for everything that he couldn’t fit in the van. On top he has a picnic table, a crash pad, a kayak, his soft stop surfboard, and eight feet of rope. There’s also a light bar which he totally recommends having if you have a van off-road. At night it gets pretty dark so it helps him keep an eye out for deer and other hazards when off road.
He has a solar shower that heats up with the Sun, so after two to three hours the water the water is the perfect temperature to take a shower. Other times, he finds it great for a rinse or to do his dishes, or even just to use as extra water storage. On the inside he added a swivel seat base for the front seats which gives him so much space, it adds almost two extra feet of living area just by flipping a seat around.
His setup isn’t very complex, all the water he uses is kept in portable jugs which makes refilling them very easy. For cold food storage Philippe uses a cooler, which works okay, but if he were to start a new van he’d put in enough electricity to run a fridge so he wouldn’t be constantly looking for ice. For cooking he uses a little two burner stove propane which is nice because it gives him the flexibility to cook outside if he wants to. In fact, he prefers it to more permanent solutions like you might find in a Volkswagen.
His bed is memory foam and really comfortable. It cost about $600, but in his opinion you cannot go cheap on the bed. It's really important because waking up sore can completely ruin the day. He did a three inch mattress with an inch and a half of feather on top so it's really good. When he built his bed he built it so it can be turned into a couch with a table, but he never uses it. When you do long term van life you learn different things like how little you use features like convertible beds. You think five minutes is okay but day after day after day after day those five minutes will be the difference between you using a feature in the van and not. It has to be as easy as possible.
His closet doesn’t have a door, so if his clothes fell off the closet he takes it as a sign that he’s driving too crazy. He stores his surfboard just with elastic into the window. There’s barely enough room for it, so if he were to do it over, he would have raised his bed more so he could have the room underneath instead of putting stuff on top of his bed.
In Philippe’s opinion, the best things in life are not things. His advice is don't be too serious. Normal is boring. The best life lesson he got from living in a van is how fulfilling connecting with nature and yourself can be. He learned so much about himself since he’s in the van, what he really needs, what he wants, where he wants to go and what he wants to do.
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