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Squinting for signs of our missing drone through the murky water of an ice-cold lake deep in the heart of rural Wyoming, I found myself asking, “How the hell did I get here?” This marathon of a road trip, we dubbed as The Great American Foil Adventure, wasn’t driven by some great fascination with kiting mountain lakes but rather an endeavor that evolved from a need to do something different. I’m from Cape Town and my partner Crystal is from Canada. We spend half of the year back in South Africa, and when Crystal’s visa expires we’re off to North America where my visa juggle begins. With a vague concept floating in our heads, in the middle of April we hopped on a flight to Calgary, Canada, and headed to Crystal’s uncle’s farm where the journey began.With snow on the ground and an outside air temperature hovering in the 40s, we started a van-life project that would eat up an entire month of planning and building and take us on a 10,000-mile kiteboarding mission through Canada and the heartland of America. Within a couple of days of our arrival, we located an office company that was selling its used fleet of mid-sized Ram Promaster city vans and purchased the last one with its back completely stripped out for cargo use. As most people do, we started with a layout in mind, rolled up to Home Depot and amidst the mass of materials, we crumpled up the original plan and immediately got lost in the details. Without a single straight line in our van, every aspect of insulating, wiring, sawing and screwing seemed endless with the ultimate goal of fitting six boards, five kites, camera equipment, a stocked camp kitchen, clothing, and a bed for two into a van no bigger than a standard SUV. Three weeks may sound like a long time, but building a mini-house inside a car is no simple feat. We took an initial trip to Squamish and in the shakedown process experienced some fails, made some repairs and hacked some mods before we set out on the open road and started our van life… To read the rest of the article, become a subscriber of Tkb Magazine.


Tkb’s Vol. 16, No. 3 fall 2019 digital issue is available now. The print issue will be landing in mailboxes soon!