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FIRST WEEK OF VAN LIFE

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Kara and Nate traded plane tickets to 100 countries for a Mercedes Sprinter and America’s back roads.

The Nashville couple who built their YouTube following on international travel spent the early months of the pandemic doing something they’d never really done: staying home. Once COVID-19 grounded their usual passport-stamping routine, Kara and Nate Buchanan bought a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, gutted it, and built out a kitchen, sleeping quarters, and a bathroom inside roughly 200 square feet. “FIRST WEEK OF VAN LIFE” picks up right where their van tour and “FIRST 48 HOURS OF FULL-TIME VAN LIFE” videos left off, following the couple through the unglamorous logistics of their opening days on the road.

• Kara and Nate converted a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van into a mobile tiny home with a full kitchen, sleeping area, and bathroom after the pandemic paused their international itinerary.
• The video documents day-to-day off-grid management — tracking fresh and grey water tank levels and monitoring electrical and battery usage — during their first seven days living in the van full-time.
• “FIRST WEEK OF VAN LIFE” follows their earlier van tour and “FIRST 48 HOURS OF FULL-TIME VAN LIFE” uploads, setting up their stated plan to travel through all 50 states.

From 100 Countries to All 50 States

Kara and Nate spent years chasing a very public goal: visiting every country in the world, a pursuit that turned them into one of the more recognizable travel channels on YouTube. When the pandemic shut down that model overnight, they pivoted domestically rather than pausing content altogether, buying a Sprinter and converting it themselves into a compact home base for a planned tour of all 50 states. The shift meant trading airport lounges and hostel check-ins for propane lines, water pumps, and a rig they’d have to learn to run themselves.

Learning the Tanks the Hard Way

Most of “FIRST WEEK OF VAN LIFE” is spent on the parts of van life nobody glamorizes on Instagram. Kara and Nate walk through checking their fresh water supply against their grey water tank so they don’t get stranded needing a dump station, and they keep an eye on how fast their battery bank drains running lights, a fridge, and camera gear off a single electrical system. It’s the same kind of off-grid power management that shows up in builds like the solar panel setups people are now bolting onto electric vehicles, just scaled down to fit a van instead of a driveway.

A kitchen, a bed, and a bathroom — all inside a van they’d owned for a matter of days.

Working From a Van With No Fixed Amenities

Beyond the plumbing and the power, the video tracks something more specific to their job: how do you edit and upload footage on a schedule when you don’t have a reliable outlet or a desk that isn’t also the dinner table? Kara and Nate had built a business on consistency, and the first week forced them to rebuild that workflow from scratch inside a moving box.

Compact Living, Real Constraints

Space is the other constant in the video — every item has to earn its spot, and the couple has to relearn basic habits like cooking, laundry planning, and even where to park overnight now that a house is also a vehicle. It’s a different kind of challenge than the ones covered in something like a 70-mile solo trek through Idaho’s Sawtooth Loop — less physical endurance, more logistics — but it carries the same theme of stripping life down to what actually fits in a pack, or in this case, a Sprinter.

Seven days in, Kara and Nate hadn’t run out of water, hadn’t drained the battery bank dead, and hadn’t missed an upload — which, for a first week in a van they’d built themselves, is about as good a scorecard as you can ask for heading into 50 states of driving.