Wild We Roam: A Love Letter to a Favorite YouTube Channel

I was first introduced to Dana and Lou a few years ago when I was researching vegan weddings.

Okay, let’s back up for a second.

I grew up in Southern California, and so many of my friends were vegetarian that even for those of us who did eat meat, it was a waste of money to serve it at birthday parties because it would go uneaten. Avoiding animal products never seemed like an extreme lifestyle choice. I started my own plant-based journey when I was 15 by cutting down on meat as much as I possibly could and went vegetarian when I graduated high school. I had the long term goal of going vegan by the time I graduated college.

During my second semester of senior year, as things started to (barely) calm down academically, I devoted a lot of free time to learning about veganism so I would be fully prepared to make the switch after graduation. I grew up watching the Food Network, and my mom did teach me cooking basics, but in the mainstream food media there were no resources I could find on vegetarian cooking, nonetheless vegan cooking. Enter, YouTube.

The vegan YouTube rabbit hole is wide, and I fell down it quickly. While there are many strange (to put it nicely) vegans on the internet, I quickly found creators, often young women not much older than me, who share recipes for delicious, easy, and affordable vegan meals. To this day when people ask me for advice on starting a plant-based lifestyle, I point them towards a few of my favorite YouTube creators.

Anyway, one day, I decided to see if there were any YouTube videos about planning a vegan wedding. Was I myself planning a vegan wedding? No! Was I even in a relationship? Also no! But a girl can dream.

At the time, there were hardly any results, and I am happy to say that has changed a lot in the past four years. However, I did find one channel where a couple shared their vegan wedding. And that channel was Wild We Roam.

Wild We Roam is comprised of Dana and Lou, a young couple documenting their lives traveling the world and living creatively. After their wedding, they moved to Berlin, bought a van, and drove around Europe for two years. A year ago, they moved back to the United States, bought a boat, and started preparing it for an expedition to sail around the world.

I know it sounds like an adventure movie manufactured by a company to inspire wanderlust in young people, but these are real people. I don’t know them, but I’ve been peeking into their lives for the past four years, watching them go from newly-wed 20-something New Yorkers to 30-year-old full time creatives whose work is funding their world travel. While there is always going to be some level of artifice in edited and curated content, Dana and Lou have been remarkably transparent. When Lou’s chronic back pain has made traveling nearly impossible, they’ve shared their struggles. As they’ve navigated learning new skills that make living in a van or on a boat possible, they’ve documented all the ups and downs for their audience. And, a few months ago, when their boat bathroom broke and they had to get down and dirty and fix it themselves, they made a YouTube video all about it. It did make me never want to sleep on a boat, nonetheless live on one full time, but I appreciated it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time when I watch YouTube videos, especially because Dana and Lou and other channels like theirs often post videos that are 20 to 30 minutes long, more like a traditional television show than the few minute long clips that made YouTube one of the internet’s most used websites. However, I ask myself, is time I enjoy really time wasted? The more and more content I consume, across all forms and genres, the less I believe in any inherent hierarchy of storytelling. Dana and Lou make very high quality short films about their life, and I have watched travel documentaries on Netflix that are less well-edited and don’t have as strong a grasp on their narrative as the weekly episodes of Wild We Roam do. We live in a world where anyone can be a storyteller, and I find myself so inspired by those among us who choose to document the bold choices they make to live life off the beaten path.

I don’t know Dana and Lou, but they feel like kindred spirits. As I sit here, at my tiny dining room table/coffee table/desk, looking out the window to my quiet Brooklyn street, I know just one click away and I can be on a real life adventure.