VAN LIFE ON HOLD - a day in our life

So today is Kurt's birthday. He is 51 years old and every single day he wakes up acting a little bit more like a giant kid, which is fantastic and totally because of this van lifestyle that we've decided to live. But I told y'all in the last video that we had a really fun, possibly funny, project that we had planned to kind of celebrate his birthday week. We went down and tried to do it yesterday, but stuff just didn't cooperate. Stuff just wasn't happening. So we're going to try again today. Now Kurt's upstairs getting everything finished up and then he's going to head down and we're going to head that way. But first we're waiting on Kurt, which is normal. There's the birthday boy. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to Kurt. All right, let's go surfing. Oh, you just blew it. I hadn't told him that's what we were going to go do. I told him we tried yesterday and stuff didn't work out. Well, I didn't tell him we tried surfing, so we tried the thing. Anyway, guys, Kurt is going to try surfing. So yesterday the waves were just flat, so we're hoping they're a little bit better today. What do you think, Kurt? I think the waves are going to be fairly flat, so it'll be a good day to get some instruction, hang out in the water, and who knows, maybe I'll get to come back when the waves are a little bigger and give her a try. But I don't know until we get down to the water. Let's go. So in Puerto Escondido, there's seven to ten beaches. One of them is Zicatela, which if you've watched our past videos, it is considered the third best big wave surfing beach in the world. But don't worry, that's not where Kurt is going to be taking his surfing lessons. Right, Kurt? They're not worried. They know I'm going to rip it up. So anyway, we're headed to Punta, which is at the very south end of Puerto Escondido, and that's where we're going to see what surfing has to do for Kurt. Now, for those that are wondering, Kurt has snowboarded a ton. He has done a little bit of wakeboarding behind a boat. He has skurfed, which is riding on a surfboard behind a boat. So hopefully he can figure this surfing thing out, especially since it's his birthday. I have never surfed, though, for the record. Yep, never surfed until today. Walking down the street on clouds instead of the concrete I'm dancing through Everything's about to come my way Nothing can ruin my day No matter what anyone does or say I smile at booze No, I don't care cause I am on my way up And I won't stop I won't slow down Standing on my feet I'm gonna rise up No, I won't stop It is my time Cause I know what it's like to be broke What it's like when nothing goes your way So I'm gonna let myself enjoy The fruit from this lucky day Yeah, I am on my way up I won't slow down I won't slow down I'm strolling down the street with all of my favorite songs I'll repeat Oliver, how long have you been here in Puerto? All my life. All your life? I was born here in Puerto. Oh, it's beautiful here. We love it here. Yeah, it's pretty nice. Yeah. Many people come to visit and stay. We've been here since March. Yeah. I gotta tell you, I have fallen in love with this place called Puerto Escondido and especially La Punta Beach. It's a little hipster beach with surfing and a lot of great shops and stores and we spent a bunch of time down there hanging out and just love it. But here's Oliver giving me a surfing lesson. He was a real good surf instructor. His English was pretty good. But if you look here, he's telling me that there's going to be a ton of paddling out there and he wants me to keep my chest and my head up high as I paddle. Now, it looks pretty easy in this, but I'm not sure if you guys have ever tried to hold your chest and your head up off the floor. It's tough. You can see me doing it here and I'm struggling. And even on the beach, standing up can be quite a challenge. But nonetheless, I felt like I was up for the challenge and looking for an exciting time. But what I will tell you, as soon as I got in the water, what Oliver said proved to be true. There was a ton of paddling. And balancing on the board is a lot harder than it looks. And certainly keeping your chest and your head up off the board, for me, was an exhausting effort. So by the time I get out to the place where we're supposed to surf, I'm just worn out. Now, I don't know about you guys, but when I envision surfing, I envision something like this right here, right? I mean, just ripping and shredding. But the reality of it is, I've come to find that surfing is a lot more like this. So I know I look like a big walrus out there, but to be honest with you, I was just slap exhausted. So again, thanks for Oliver. But I wasn't the only one laying around on my board. I guess that's just mostly what surfers do when they're not paddling. But honestly, on a flat day like today, where there wasn't a lot of big waves, we spent a lot of time waiting for the waves. And when one came, this was the coolest part about surf school, is I would get a little friendly push from Oliver. What you don't see in this video is on the beach, Snow was working her tail off to try to capture the day's events. She's running around with our big lens camera, trying to get some good zooms like that, working the drone, trying to get some nice drone shots. And she also had the pocket trying to walk around and get some good action shots. And so on some of my best rides, unfortunately, Snow was between cameras. Now she did have one fixed, and so you could kind of see the angle. But unfortunately, as the drone moved and the camera and I moved, I went out of shot. So my best rides weren't captured on video, but this is what they looked like. I promise. I think he's beat. He got up a couple of times, so hopefully I caught it on film. He headed back to the van. He needs some water. And we're going to show Oliver the van. Then I think we'll probably take Kurt home to shower. So it was a lot of fun, though. I can't wait to see what he thought about it. But the old man has to rest a little bit first. So would you do it again? Did you like it? Yeah, I loved it. I would absolutely love to do it again. I don't know that I underestimated it, but it takes a lot of energy. I mean, not only are you out there, you know, kind of holding yourself up and stabilizing yourself, but you're kicking and you're paddling with your arms. And then you kind of got to lean up into this like Cobra pose and just your muscles from just holding that all the day for a while get fatigued. So, I mean, I was just I was just exhausted. And so you definitely want to be in better shape or get you will get in shape if you surf. So I enjoyed it. I would like to do it again, but I definitely need to get in better shape. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that as much as I did. I had an absolute blast. Thank you, Snow, for an amazing birthday. It was just a great time. I was actually able to pop up on the surfboard a couple times. And it's probably something I'll try a little bit more later on in our journey. So I look forward to that. But I got some news for you guys. 2020 has been a crazy year and busy year for us, but we had over a million views on our van tour video. So how about that for a birthday present? Thank you guys for that. What an amazing feedback from you guys. We really appreciate all the comments. But one thing I learned that most people want to know is how much it costs to convert this thing. And so I'm working on a new video series that's going to cover just that. And so it's not only going to cover the cost to build this van, but I also want to take a perspective of what would it cost if you wanted to cut some corners or maybe take some things out so you could price what the build would actually cost you. Not just what it cost me, but what it would cost you. Maybe if you kind of did it your way. And then also what it would cost if you had somebody else build it. And these videos will be done in a way that you'll be able to customize and figure out and get a good estimate on what it would cost for your dream van if you were to build it yourself, including the cost of our van. And so hit the notification bell and subscribe bell so you can get those. We're going to start dropping those coming this Wednesday, and they're going to be going on for a few windies. So I'm pretty excited to share this stuff with you guys. I'm working on putting out the content right now. And also, if you guys like these surfing videos or these beach videos, we were up in the Baja and had a great time in a place, the snow called Beach Bar Beach. I called it Surfing Beach, but we were watching the whales jump and we were watching the surfers. We parked the van right on the beach. It was a super cool place. So we'll put the video right here. So you can just click on that if you want to watch that video. And then also just I think it was last week we did a we got a new drone and we went right here to Laputa, got some great surfing footage and footage of us right here at Laputa hanging out. And so if you enjoyed that, check that video out. I'll put that right here as well. And meanwhile, thanks a lot for watching. Thanks for subscribing. Always enjoy your comments. We'll see you on the next one.