What do you consider to be your place of work? 

My “place of work” would have to be New York City. Before we started traveling Kassandra and I were both really focused on our careers. For 15 years or so we were both just kind of living the typical city life. Kassandra does clothing development for women’s fashion brands. I design products and graphics, and do a lot of marketing consulting.

In 2010 we bought a home in Brooklyn, and establishing that was really our focus for a long time. Some people who only know us through Instagram (@ontheroadhome) might not know that we’re only on the road about 1/2 of the time. We still own our place in Brooklyn. I have a business making custom audio equipment that I manufacture there (@devonojas). When we’re on the road I often bring some design work with me, but the clients are all either in NYC or come from contacts there. We try to do about 2 months on the road and then return to New York for as long as it takes to finish all of the work that’s piled up while we were gone.

One of the main reasons that we’re able to support ourselves on the road is doing short term rentals of our home in Brooklyn while we’re gone. I manage it myself and it actually winds up being a fair amount of work, especially when we’re camping at a remote surf spot with no cell service. We’re really lucky that we built ourselves a foundation in a city like New York, and we’re still able to leverage that while we spend our money more frugally, i.e. living in a car in Mexico 🙂

Tell me about your vehicle. What do you call it? 

We have a Four Wheel Camper Fleet Ute on a 2012 Toyota Tacoma. I guess we call it home.

When and how did you get it?

I guess it was 2014 when Kassandra and I started surfing a lot. It’s really cool that you can live in New York City and surf a day or two a week, but both of us were wanting to surf better waves and much more often. We both had pretty intense full time jobs and hadn’t even considered leaving them yet. Some of our friends had seasonal rentals out in Montauk and that seemed great, but it didn’t make sense for us financially. Meanwhile, I was feeling really envious of friends on the west coast who had vans or truck campers. This lifestyle was really catching on in surfing and snowboarding culture out there, but no one was doing it here in the Northeast.

But then I started thinking about all of the fishermen that I grew up seeing driving their truck campers out to Montauk. Where were they going? Could this be possible here too? So I started doing research and I discovered the Long Island Beach Buggy Association. These guys have been fighting to maintain the right to access by vehicle and camp on remote beaches for the purpose of fishing since the 1950s. Through LIBBA I discovered that with the right equipment and permits we could essentially live beachfront where friends were paying crazy money for a room in a shared house 30 minutes from the beach.

The parks require that you have 4×4, recovery equipment, fresh water, gray water and black water storage and a built in toilet; no Porta Poti’s. This meant that we would have to build a legit rig at no small investment. But this was already a no brainer to me, because it was so affordable compared to renting a beach house on the East End of Long Island.

For Kassandra, it wasn’t so clear at first. Kassandra grew up in Puerto Rico and New York City, and had unsurprisingly never camped a day in her life. She thought I was crazy, but she kind of got it. When I started building our vehicle she said that she had a one night limit. “That’s okay,” I thought. I could easily justify the expense if we could surf on Saturday, camp, surf Sunday and return on Sunday night.

Our first weekend on the beach changed everything. Kass was hooked. She wanted to come back as often as possible and stay as long as possible. Our trips started getting longer and priorities started shifting as we realized that we wanted to explore more and work less. By the end of the year my partners and I sold the business that I was working full time in, and I decided that I did not want to stay and work for someone else. Since then it’s been a major priority of ours to find ways of earning more time and less money so that we can live on the road as much as possible.

In December of 2015 we drove across the country and left the truck in San Diego, preparing for our first trip down Baja and into mainland Mexico–a trip that ended up maxing out the six month Temporary Import Permit on the truck. Over time we realized that not only was there no one night max, but we’re comfortable enough in our truck to live out of it indefinitely.