We’re Cody & Madison – husband and wife, traveling occupational therapists, and budget travel adventurers. After receiving our Master’s of Occupational Therapy degrees from the University of Missouri, we headed out for the open road.
In the summer of 2021, we upgraded Cody’s ancient Corolla (seriously – the car was only 3 years younger than we were!) to a 2012 Toyota Sienna minivan with the dream to turn it into a tiny camper. We removed the second row of seats and stowed the third row into the floor compartments to make room for our new camping setup.
As Madison was working 3 part-time jobs, Cody was studying for his board exams in the morning and building out the van in the evenings. Our simple van build took about 3-4 weeks to complete, with Cody’s board exams and packing up our grad school townhouse to move our belongings out of state and into storage taking up a fair amount of time as well.
Five days after Cody got his board results and became a registered occupational therapist, we celebrated by heading out on a 10 week camping expedition to 17 national parks in our brand new mini-camper-van. The middle section of the van (where the second and third row seats used to be) now holds a 6ft long bed platform with drawers underneath. The back hatch opens up to our kitchen space, similar in design to a teardrop camper. There are no bathroom facilities in our van, so we stayed at campgrounds that had bathhouses throughout our trip.
After 10 weeks on the road we returned home for a brief stay, before deciding that we hadn’t quite had our fill of adventure and drove all the way from the midwest back to the west coast to start our first travel therapy contracts. Since the start of 2022 we’ve been scheduling our life in 3-month intervals of work in new areas, exploring on the weekends or in breaks between our contracts.
We started this blog to help us catalog these adventures, and share these beautiful places with all of you. Thank you for being here with us.