Fulfill Your Vintage Volkswagen #VanLife Fantasies with This California Tour

You’ve heard of #vanlife, right? That whole thing where people hit the road for long stretches at a time, living out of a vehicle equipped balls-to-the-wall with as many modern conveniences as possible? Of course you have, you don’t live under a rock. Instagram is littered with people who have outwardly embraced the lifestyle, and every time you see one of those posts, you wonder: what if?

Well, you can stop wondering, because a tour company out in California is ready to give you the #vanlife experience — for a few hours, that is. Tour outfit California Adventure might not have an easy-to-find website (and definitely won’t win Most Original Company Name anytime soon…), but what they can do is hook you up with a tour of Malibu’s landscapes and wine culture, all while behind the wheel of a 1972 Volkswagen camper van.

Okay, you don’t actually get to drive — that’s the tour guide’s job — but that’s okay, because instead of focusing on the road, you can simply sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. The Vintage VW Hippie Sightseeing Tour (with Wine Tasting) is #vanlife distilled into a four-hour excursion, including countless opportunities for photo ops with the vintage van, the chance to sip on some local wines, and stops at some beautiful southern California locales, like Point Dume.

The tour, which runs twice a day and costs $179 per person, gets started at Santa Monica Pier. Depending on which time of day you book, your experience starts one of two ways. The morning tour, which goes from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. local time, begins with a sightseeing tour up the coastline. You’ll roll past a number of vineyards perched in the Santa Monica Mountains, head back out to Point Dume and its cliffside views of the ocean, and finish with a stop at Malibu Pier.

Afterwards, the driver of your vintage Volkswagen camper van will steer you toward a local tasting room, where you’ll be able to sample four varietals and be treated to some light fare (cheese, salami, and crackers). The afternoon/evening tour, which runs from 3 to 7 p.m. local time, includes all the same experiences, but runs in reverse order, with the wine tasting first and the sightseeing tour second.

If all of that isn’t enough to satisfy your #vanlife fantasies, don’t worry: California Adventure has another vintage Volkswagen-centric tour that takes things in a slightly different direction by swapping out wine tasting for surf lessons. The Malibu Beach Surf Tour in a Vintage VW Van comes with a similar sightseeing package, a session with a professional surf instructor, and lunch cooked right inside the van — all for $222 per person.

Whether you’d like to sip on some vino or catch some waves, you really can’t go wrong here. Just remember to post as many photos of the experience as you can online (or, as we all know, it didn’t really happen).

-LTH