The Green Van Plan: A GTRV Customer Spotlight

Tips

Apr 3

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She had a plan. Then life had other ideas.

Susan Guy started oil painting when she was ten. She's also been a backpacker her whole life. She jokes that she started backpacking in the womb, which isn't much of an exaggeration. Her parents were both physicians and full-on backpackers who hiked every chance they got. Growing up in New Zealand, the outdoors wasn't something you drove to on weekends. It was just how the family moved through the world.

For a long time, those two things went together naturally. She'd load up an easel and a full kit of oil paints, head out into the backcountry, and set up wherever the light looked right. She paints en plein air, abstract expressionist landscapes, the kind of work that's less about replicating a place and more about capturing what it feels like to stand inside it.

She'd go to serious lengths to get where she wanted to be. Up a gondola in ski gear to paint from the top of a mountain in Mammoth, out before dawn in Rocky Mountain National Park with her easel propped against the car door in gale-force winds because that's where the painting was.

Then a few years ago, she was visiting her brother in New Zealand and helping out on a conservation project, building a dock. She decided that walking planks on her shoulder wasn't enough of a workout, so she started running with them. Then she went scuba diving. Later she discovered that the neck pain she had been pushing through was actually a herniated disc.

"The best way to power through pain," she'll tell you, laughing, "is to go running and scuba diving and power through it."

She had surgery and recovered, but the heavy pack and the long backcountry treks weren't really an option anymore, at least not in the way she'd always done them. For someone who had been hauling art gear into the wilderness since she was young, that was a significant thing to sit with.

Finding a different way in

After moving to the US she spent years going out to Anza-Borrego near San Diego, and over time she'd worked her way through Death Valley and much of the Southwest. So when the backcountry became harder to access, her first instinct wasn't to stop going. It was to figure out a different way to get there.

She started researching vans. She'd had a thing for Toyotas for years. She was an exchange student in Japan, and growing up the family would go out into the desert in old FJ40s and FJ80s, the boxy Land Cruisers that feel like they were built specifically for people who want to go somewhere they probably shouldn't. She wanted AWD for rough terrain. She needed to be able to stand up inside because of her neck. And she needed somewhere to sleep comfortably on longer trips.

While she was researching, she came across a video of a Toyota Sienna with a pop-top roof conversion. That thread eventually led her to our shop in Sebastopol.

"I even contacted them before I bought the vehicle," she says, "just to make sure what I was seeing online was real and could actually be done."

It was. She bought an AWD Sienna LE, drove it up to Sebastopol, and we put the pop-top on. She describes the whole process as remarkably smooth. No surprises, no pressure, just people walking her through the options and answering her questions. We talked through solar panel configurations and helped her sort out connector compatibility between her two different power stations.

When we noticed that opening the pop-top was difficult for her because of her injury, we set her up with a ratchet tool that made it easier. When she was done and needed to return the rental car but didn't have a vehicle, we gave her a ride.

"Just everything was thought of," she says. "And no hidden costs."

Her first trip was back down the coast toward home, stopping at Doran Beach in Sonoma County and Pinnacles National Park along the way. After her first Death Valley trip she added a lift kit for a bit more ground clearance. She also discovered that waterproof baby mattress covers (playpen size) fit her sleeping cushions perfectly, which matters when you travel with dogs. At this point, she says, the van is pretty much dialed in.

The painting, the iPad, and the Green Van Plan

Carrying a heavy pack was no longer an option. This meant she couldn't carry oil paints and a plein air easel out into the field anymore. But she could bring an iPad.

She'd been resistant to digital painting for most of her life. Her own description of her previous approach: "Luddite," "plein air purist," "has to be done on location, hand on, carry everything." The iPad felt like a concession. But she started learning it anyway, and somewhere along the way she noticed something about the painting app she was using: it kept a record of every brushstroke. The full process, from the first light sketch to the final layered painting, was stored and replayable.

She'd also been getting back into photography and had started thinking about video. She put those two things together and realized she could make something interesting: films that move back and forth between the painting coming together and the story of the place itself. The geology, the ecology, the natural history of wherever she happens to be painting. She's been working through a Death Valley series, has a Bodega Bay video done, and has Joshua Tree in the queue. Each one is made by one person with an iPad and iMovie, figuring it out as she goes.

The channel is called the Green Van Plan. The thinking behind it is pretty clear-eyed. Susan is a physician, and she thinks carefully about why people do or don't change their behavior.

"They want to know what's in it for them" she says, matter-of-factly. "So maybe if I can get people enthusiastic about beautiful places and weird natural history, through art and this journey, they might want to help protect it."

Her goal right now is 500 subscribers. She's also planning to use the van to make cross-country trips as her life gradually shifts toward moving to New England. Up through Canada, across to New England, down through parks she hasn't spent time in yet. The van makes all of it workable: mobile office, painting studio, base camp at the edge of wherever she's going.

Valley of the Gods in Utah is on the calendar too. She goes almost every year. It's her favorite place in the world.

Follow Susan's journey on YouTube at youtube.com/@GreenVanPlan and on Instagram at instagram.com/greenvanplan. Her paintings are at skguyart.com.

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Want to talk it through?

Susan came to us knowing exactly how she wanted to use her van. Not everyone does, and that's fine too.

Most of these conversations start the same way: here's how I travel, here's what I need, what makes sense?

If you're asking yourself the same kinds of questions, we're happy to think it through with you.

Call us at 888-332-9602 or send us a message here

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