On the road again: east alumni and couple travel the country in their van

After moving into an apartment together at the end of December 2019 and working 40 plus hours a week and saving for over a year, East alumni and couple Sawyer Waterman and Willa Ivancic were ready to take off in their 1986 Ford Econoline E-150.  

When the pandemic hit, their “Tour of America” trip was postponed — but now, four months into their journey, they’ve made it through the tough parts of living on the road while building their relationship.

After testing positive for COVID-19 in mid-June, the recent high school graduates were kicked out of their apartment and quarantined on the floor of a vacant house on Troost, a property of Willa’s father’s. 

In the two weeks spent keeping their distance, Willa and Sawyer did mostly electrical work to their van, adding 200w solar panels, 1000w inverter and 250OAHH of lithium-ion batteries to wire together in one system — all things Sawyer learned from East  Auto Technician teacher, Brian Gay. After working on the van for up to 11 hours a day, the couple set off on July fourth for Colorado, with no goodbyes to friends or family due to possibility of transmitting the virus. 

As Willa researched new places to stop in Colorado, Sawyer made his way down I-70, blasting Midnight Blue and Lucky Love. Arriving at their first location, Steamboat Springs, they used their Camp Hendium app to find the next location on their route, as well as asking people on the road for suggestions of where to head next. 

“We keep the [phone] numbers of people we meet and we check in, but I think we all understand that if we are not going the same route, we’re not going to see each other again,” Sawyer said. “I think that it’s just kinda how it is.” 

However, they’ve had more abnormal interactions with other campers as opposed to the normal friendly greeting and recommendations. During their explorations, Sawyer and Willa decided to go off the grid up a random mountain, miles away from any town. There, they met a man named Allen, who became an on-the-road father figure to the couple for weeks — making meals for them, receiving meals from them and helping them with whatever they needed while staying on the mountain. 

However, their trip hasn’t been all happy-go-lucky. In one incident, the couple had to call the cops on domestic abuse within neighboring vans as well as watching another van go up in 50-foot flames.

By the end of their Colorado excursion, they’d hit nearly every major city they wanted to — Steamboat Springs, Rocky Mountain National Park, Denver, Boulder, Solverthron, Frisco, Colorado Springs and Grand Junction — staying in each spot for at least a week or two, and Buena Vista for nearly two months due to a cracked oil pan in their engine.

While the couple spent lots of time saving money prior to the trip — Sawyer working multiple jobs throughout high school and Willa nannying and serving — dealing with everything from the cracked oil pan to multiple van breakdowns caused further funding issues — not to mention the 10-miles-per-gallon the van gets.

Making money on the road is an obstacle for nearly everyone living this lifestyle, according to Willa. To get a job, they’d need an address. To get an address, they’d need to find someone willing to let them use their own or they’d need to purchase a P.O. box. But even if they do those things, they’d likely be moving onto their next location within two weeks of landing the job. 

But amid the financial fears and awkward interactions, the couple has been finding creative ways to make profits. 

“I’ve been wrapping rocks with wire and I’ve been making resin jewelry, so I’m finding all the like flowers around or dirt, flowers from everywhere we’ve been,” Willa said. “It’s really fun actually, I’m just examining the ground whenever we’re walking, and I pick up random flowers, and I’m like ‘ahh this might look good in a necklace!’”

After wrapping up their time in Colorado, Sawyer and Willa are now settled in Southern Utah where they plan to explore the national parks. 

After Utah, their plan is to head to the Grand Canyon and later the Southern coast of California, where they’ll park the van, taking Sawyer’s Volkswagen sedan — which Willa went back to Kansas City to pick up during the two months in Buena Vista — back to Kansas City for the holidays. Following the holidays, they’ll head up the California coast and finish at Alaska, their peak and goal for their trip, by next summer — if the Canadian border opens up that is. 

According to Sawyer, through working towards personal growth and finding themselves on this trip, their relationship has grown tremendously. They’ve both had to learn how to be with each other more than even most married couples have to. 

“The hardest part about this is learning to live with someone nonstop, learning to be okay with the things that irk you about another person, and really learning how to communicate with each other,” Willa said. “We’ve gotten so much better; we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into, [living in an apartment] was actually extremely helpful because if we wouldn’t have done that, we probably would have broken up.”

Although they’ve only made a dent in the overall plans for the trip, both Willa and Sawyer have experienced things they’ve never before — finding somewhere to use the restroom while isolated on a mountain is new to them both.

“The most valuable takeaway is flexibility because so much stuff happens that is so unexpected that you have to kind of just jump into and you can’t really let them affect you,” Willa said. “Living this kind of life on your own without any real financial support from anyone, trying to pay for your own food, trying to figure out what the heck to do when your car breaks down or when you hit a bump and the oil pan’s leaking all over the place. You just can’t let stuff affect you. So much to the point of letting it destroy you because it will. It’s hard just being okay with letting stuff happen.”

Sawyer has appreciated the existentialism of the experience. He feels smaller and smaller as he lays on a slab of dirt in front of the van staring up at the stars in Utah. 

“I know for sure that I don’t know who I am, and I think this gap year is kind of shaping me into the person that I might be,” Sawyer said. “Sometimes that can be really really hard and that’s the bad existential part is that you don’t know who you are, and then you’re looking to find that, and at the same time you just feel so small.”