LANSING, Mich (WLNS) — Chandler Krasnicki, 19, is hitting the road again in his fully converted 1998 Dodge Ram van, a ride he’s been traveling the country in for four months, pursuing what he says is “his best life.”
“I asked myself, if money wasn’t an object what would I do? And without even thinking about it, I already knew the answer – I would hit the road and never look back,” Krasnicki told 6 News.
Krasnicki graduated from Grand Blanc High School in 2021. He said he decided to take an alternative path, or trail, for his life. “It’s harder, I feel like in my opinion, harder than a 9-5,” Krasnicki said. “I feel like a 9-5 you’re given a specific task and if you go to college and/or taught to do that specific task but it’s like everything I’m doing is all from scratch and it’s all on me, I don’t have a mentor, I don’t have anything. So I’m kind of throwing myself out there and it’s sink or swim.”
In a world leaving people feeling empty and a life that seems to pass him by, Krasnicki said he had to find what truly made him happy. It was hiking, landscape photography and traveling while creating content on YouTube that filled his needs.
“If YouTube takes off then I’ll be riding it until the wheels fall off you know what I’m saying so it’s all just a matter of time and it’s all just working towards making it sustainable as possible and the pressures kinda on right now but I have full faith that I can make it happen,” Krasnicki said.
His journey has taken him from Montana’s Glacier National Park to Washington’s North Cascades National Park. Then to the Olympic Peninsula, down to Oregon and California where he stopped off at the cliffs of Big Sur.
“Anybody can do something for a day,” Krasnicki said. “Anybody can do something for two days but to show up every single day for and there’d no need date and to just be really disciplined and just you know stick to what you got is the biggest thing you can do – and just really don’t listen to the noise because if there a lot of haters if there’s a lot of noise that means you’re doing something right.”
To pay for his adventures, Krasnicki said after building up some savings he has kept running his parent’s social media for their paint company in Grand Blanc and hopes to one day make money from his YouTube channel.
To follow his adventures, he publishes his content on his YouTube channel called Van Man Chan.
