Get Hip and Take a Trip
Emilie Vardaman, Pioneering the Radical Art of Car Camping in the 70s and Beyond
Emilie Vardaman is a peach. A child of the 60s and 70s, she is true to the music, lifestyles, and social causes that defined her long ago. A sweet heart, kind to fellow travelers.
But a peach can get bruised, and that’s what finally happened.
Bummer, Man
July 15, 2025, started like another normal day.
Emilie had just come home, having driven about 2,500 miles on a trip to Kentucky and Michigan to visit family. At 78, long trips had become more taxing than they once were.
As Emilie was on her way to meet friends, things suddenly went black. She passed out behind the wheel. Propelled by momentum, the car stayed on the road for some time--a minute or two, or more--before veering off the road and crashing into an electric pole.
The impact detonated the airbag, which hit her with the force of a punch in the face.
Minutes had passed before Emilie woke again to the sound of people knocking on her car window, asking if she was OK. She heard them say the ambulance was on its way. She was still pinned inside by the airbag.
“Was anyone else hurt?” she asked. “No,” the stranger said. “You hit a pole.” “Thank God.”
After all the tests and procedures had been done, and the results came in, the doctor said, “Your blood pressure dropped so suddenly that it caused you to black out. Your BP meds failed to keep your blood pressure at a safe level. No more driving till we sort this out.”
Omg. Her driving days might be over.
It Began with a Weekend of Mud and Music
But who is Emilie? How did she get started on the road? And why is she still out here?
Emilie is a soft-spoken, petite road life pioneer, raised in La Grange, Illinois, who has been on the road since 1970. Emilie made car camping history.
On Memorial Day weekend in 1970 Emilie told me she, “drove (her) little Honda 160 motorcycle to the Kickapoo Creek Rock Festival (Also known as the “Incident at Kickapoo Creek”), and we all camped out in the rain and mud.”
Typical Emilie understatement. The festival, in Heyworth, Illinois, was a major event.
The Kickapoo Festival was one of the largest major outdoor rock festivals after Woodstock, and one of the last big ones. It attracted up to 60,000 fans. The line up featured Canned Heat, The Butterfield Blues Band, REO Speedwagon, and B.B. King.
How did this quiet woman from the Midwest launch herself into that maelstrom of music? Like everything else, she just threw herself into the things that interested her. Fearlessly.
Emilie was the product of amazing times. Some people tuned out the 70s and remained conventional, while Emilie tuned in and turned on to the electric energy of that decade.
She was a signal finder. When you find that signal and lock onto it, anything is possible.
Conventional in some ways, Emilie had gone to college, and had become a teacher, but to the everlasting consternation of her parents, she still dreamed of traveling solo. It was a recurring dream since her early childhood, when she watched the TV show, ‘Let’s Take a Trip,” on the air from 1955-58.
“I want to take a trip!” she often told her parents; they smiled, whispering to each other, “Maybe she’ll calm down when she gets older.”
Nope.
***
A Chance Meeting on the Road
Emilie and I met down at Kino Bay in Sonora, Mexico, in January, 2024. We both stayed at the Islandia Marina RV park. She was there for two weeks; I was there for the season.
At first glance, I assumed she was just another retired snowbird from Bisbee, Arizona. We started comparing notes about our van life experience. I announced that I had been on the road full-time for two years; she casually mentioned that she had road tripped for over 50.
Shut my mouth. Of fellow travelers I met, none had been on the road as long as she had. And she had done most of her traveling while camping in a car, often solo, since 1976.
***
A Bit of Historical Context
Not everyone reading this lived through the incredible foment of the 60s and 70s, as Emilie did, and few women made the curious choice to become a car camping road warrior. What drew her into life on the road, and in whose footsteps did she follow?
A brief history of women traveling the road alone in America may provide useful context about an obscure and murky topic. Here are a few women road trip pioneers:
- Alice Huyler Ramsey, the first woman to drive an automobile solo across the US from Coast to Coast, in 1909
- Janine Wiedel, a documentary photographer from NYC, based in the UK since the 1970s, who lived and traveled in her VW van in Birmingham England in the late 1970s
- The Woodswomen, a nonprofit organization promoting outdoor adventure travel exclusively for women. From 1977 to 1999, it supported about 8,000 women.
- The Van Dykes, an itinerant band of lesbian separatist vegans, founded in 1977 in the United States by Heather Elizabeth and Ange Spalding
Road tripping, van life, and car camping in the 1960s, 70s, on up to 2000, took place in the absence of the Internet, cell phones, and other technology that now makes it easy for travelers to find each other, share stories, and promote their lifestyle. Not so back then.
The only way to find out about the trail blazers is to stumble onto one by chance and ask.
***
The Women’s Liberation Movement gathered steam in the 1970s. Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine in 1971. The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. Suddenly, women could do anything! And Emilie did. But it was one thing to read about Women’s Lib in the newspaper or to learn about it on the TV news. Emilie lived it. She liberated herself.
At the elementary school in Clinton Illinois, where she taught K-8, a colleague stood up in the teacher’s lounge before spring break and said, “I’m driving to Tucson over the break. Who wants to go?”
Her hand shot up. Emilie blurted out, “I want to go!” When she looked around the lounge, she was the only one who volunteered. The others stared at her. “What’s their problem?”
She rode along to Tucson with her male coworker, who was driving out to see his girlfriend. She stayed in the YWCA for five dollars a night.
In September that year, she joined a group of people driving an empty school bus to Tucson. She told me, “My little Honda 160 was strapped to the front of the bus.
Emilie, a surprisingly tough gal with a gentle demeanor, said the first car she camped in was “an Oldsmobile, a big, long car, from about 1972. “It was 1976 and I was in Seattle.”
As we spoke, the image of Emilie as the embodiment of an era grew clearer. “Stop children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down…” Emilie had both eyes wide open.
She picked up on the vibes in the air in those heady days, and without analyzing or questioning why, she jumped on board anything that moved!
Emilie was a trailblazer, among the first women to car camp consistently for decades.
But although travel fascinated her, she insisted it wasn’t all about travel. A tremendous amount was going on politically and socially, including the Vietnam War. Like many people her age, Emilie got involved in the Vietnam War protests. It was a time of rapid change.
***
Learning About Car Camping from the Expert
What exactly is car camping? It’s like van life, except that a car has about a third of the space, and only one person can sleep comfortably in a car at a time. How did she sleep?
She curled up and slept in the back seat of her first car, but in her SUV, she took out the back seats, and had a friend build her a sleeping platform that extended to the back end.
“I have been car camping since 1976,” she told me. I asked her if she was ever afraid. “Maybe at first,” she said, “But then I trained myself to jump into action if someone snuck up on me or knocked on the car door. Do you know that I can be in the driver’s seat and ready to go in just over 30 seconds?” That’s incredibly fast.
Back when Emilie started car camping, the term “van life” didn’t exist yet. The now famous hashtag, #vanlife, would not be coined by Foster Huntington until 2011.
***
If you’re like me, you may be scratching your head, wondering, how did she do it? And why? It’s impossible to explain it in a way that makes senses to everyone. If you are a homebody who likes creature comforts, the idea of sleeping in a car may strike you as horrible.
Take it on faith that for some people, hitting the road often compensates for comfort.
But why car camp, you ask? Why not travel in a van?
In those early days, car camping gave Emilie multiple things some vans couldn’t: stealth (less conspicuous than a van), getaway speed (thirty seconds from waking to driving), spontaneity (less gear to pack) and sovereignty (low cost, no permission required).
Car camping offers simplicity. Choose the smallest vehicle that gets you there—then go.
For Emilie, sleeping in a cramped space in a car does not matter as much as going. The hum of the road, the feel of the wheels on the highway, clicking past mile markers, the amazing scenery that lies around every bend and over every hill, is irresistible to her.
Without knowing it, she helped invent car camping for women, in her quiet, soft-spoken, unassuming way, following in the footsteps of earlier female road warriors.
***
Modesty and Community Among Women Who Hit the Road
As I thought about my interview with Emilie, it confounded me. She had done so much, but was so humble about it all. She didn’t narrate or embellish her daring deeds; she just did it.
Also puzzling to me: wherever she went, she quickly made friends with other women. They formed community on the road, and helped each other out. This was something I still did not understand. Men are almost always out there alone. How do women do it, I wonder.
***
Fast forward. Emilie told me, “I never get tired of the van life or car camping.” She told me about a number of other trips she took in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, up to the present
Somehow, she never runs out of curiosity, or enthusiasm, or wanderlust.
Turn On, Tune In for the Takeaway
Emilie has found something that would benefit many of us: her passion. She is humble to a fault, and does not proselytize for car camping, but it’s her jam, and she still loves it.
By tuning in and turning on to life, she found her passion in the 70s and has never lost it.
Sadly, a lot of us have gone through life without finding our passion. Or, we found it, but unfortunate events conspired to take it away from us, sending us back to the start line.
Despite setbacks in life, it’s never too late to rediscover an old passion or find a new one.
Recall the words of this hit song from Fleetwood Mac. “You can go your own way.” The cosmic signals vary and the stations have changed over time. The signal fades in and out, but you can still find it if you try. Although sometimes we don’t realize we have found it.
The lesson Emilie teaches us is not a map to follow; it’s a permission slip. Pack your courage. Turn off the streaming series and go outside. Stare up at the night sky. Clear your mind. When the static fades and your mind is free, you might hear the universe speaking.`
If the road calls, turn the key and go. Maybe your next chapter is a short hop with a friend.
Let Nature Speak
She says she often found herself face to face with the awesome majesty of nature, seeing incredible places that most people only dream about. Of these experiences, Emilie says: “I get a deeply spiritual feeling that is impossible for me to put adequately into words.”
Listen to what nature has to say.
Emilie’s Contributions and Prospects
I hope that someday, someone writes the full story of the pioneering women who travel solo, in a car or a van, and that Emilie is on page one. It would make one hell of a book.
In case you’re wondering about Emilie, she’s taking it one day at a time now, still recovering from the accident and struggling with the possibility that she might not be able to drive.
Who else feels that Emilie should be given her due honors and keep going? I hope the road continues to call, and that other amazing women in van life will invite Emilie to ride along.
They would hear some amazing stories along the way.
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Of course I read this great story to the end. Thanks for sharing, Carl.
I did too, Suzie! I loved hearing about Emilie's life on the road.