About

The Lost Longboarder

The Lost Longboarder is a budget adventure blog fueled by our company, Lost Coast Longboarding. Lost Coast Longboarding consists of the two of us creating one of a kind hand painted longboards as well as t-shirts designed and screen printed by us. We run our business while living on the road full time and adventuring as often as possible.

We created The Lost Longboarder blog to document and share our experiences on the road as well as to provide a glimpse into our personal attempt at freedom. We hope to inspire, entertain, and inform you with articles about our adventures and our on the road lifestyle.

We have adventures of all sorts from hiking to high elevation lakes and exploring desert canyons to longboarding in skate parks and neighborhoods. We find awesome longboarding and hiking spots all around the country.

While on our boards we cruise smooth streets and long paths, shred skate parks and bomb hills. When we are not longboarding we love to hike, rock climb, bag peaks, and explore the world around us. We find some pretty awesome things and some amazing places.

Through our articles, we hope to use our experiences to expose you to the challenges and the rewards as well as show you that both adventures and misadventures can make you feel alive. We want The Lost Longboarder to be our means to provide you with tips for creating your own adventures and to demonstrate how by living simply you can live an adventurous lifestyle on a budget.

(Note: We didn’t sell a house or win the lottery first, we had minimal savings because we worked jobs with minimal pay… We had an idea for a business, a drive to work at it and we were willing to take a risk to attain our happiness. I’m telling you this because if you’re on the fence about making a similar life change I want you to know that it can be done with limited resources, self control, and the ability to live simply.)

How it Came to Be

Let’s jump right into the driving forces behind the creation of The Lost Longboarder! We deeply value experiencing new things, being together, and travelling so we realized that settling into the 9-5, mortgage, and kids lifestyle was not for us. Once we put our values into perspective, we made the jump and started living full time on the road in September 2017.

(If only it were that easy! In actuality, those realizations and learning about ourselves took time! It took a couple years of personal growth and experience to understand what our feelings and passions meant. And it took just as long to realize that if we push societies expectations aside we had other lifestyle options that would allow us to enjoy life on our own terms. With the combination of this newly discovered drive and direction we started the journey to our personal freedom.)

Be sure to read our individual about sections to get a better understanding of the thoughts and personal journeys behind how it came to be.

Our Attempt at Freedom

Since then, we’ve been focused on creating our own freedom by being self-sufficient and living simply. We live simply with our on the road lifestyle by spending time, not money, on new experiences, not possessions. We are conscientious of our spending and we strive to live within our means. Luckily, we find joy and happiness in adventures and experiences at no cost. We choose to live this lifestyle because we believe that discovering new places, meeting new people, and experiencing new things keeps our excitement for life ignited and sustains our personal growth.

We have created our self-sufficiency with the combination of both our lifestyle and our company, Lost Coast Longboarding. You can head over to the shop to see the products behind the passion!

Working for ourselves provides a great sense of self-sufficiency and happiness because we enjoy what we do. We love travelling to new places to sell our boards and we love the opportunity we get to meet new people as a result. We enjoy the positive interactions that we experience as we immerse ourselves in and get to know the communities first hand.

We find that our work is very rewarding which in return is very motivating. We don’t make much money with our small business but we make enough to support our simple lifestyle. We cut costs and further our self-sufficiency by only buying what we need, boondocking, and enjoying the simple joys in life.

Living full time on the road has its ups and downs but it’s always an adventure!

About the Adventurers

Hello! We’re Shane and Katie, the writers and adventurers behind The Lost Longboarder. Keep reading to learn more about who we are as individuals and our experiences that led up to the lifestyle we live now!

About Shane

Hello, I’m Shane! I am a pretty fun and outgoing guy. I’m laid back, I have a big heart and I rarely take things seriously. I am an extremely creative person and I like to think that I live life on the edge. I really like double stuffed Oreos, longboarding, creating art, not having a TV, and exploring the world with my wife. I am a mid-west kid but for some reason I have always had the west coast in my blood.

Track and Field used to be a very important part of my life, from middle school and high school, all the way though NCAA collage. I was a pole vaulter, a sprinter, and a jumper. This chapter of my life led me to understand the importance of being active and fit, both of which I strive to maintain today.

As an adult, I can do anything I want! So I rock climb a lot, hike a lot, ride my longboard a lot, and eat too much cereal and cookies. I am very optimistic and I believe in the power of the mind. Life has taught me that anything can happen, and I truly believe that anyone can achieve anything they want. If they keep a positive attitude, set intentions, and try and try and try.

Art has been a very important part of my life. I have been an artist my whole life, constantly creating art through many different mediums. I would doodle in high school everyday and in college I would doodle in class to stay awake. I used to be intrigued by calligraphy, which led me to graffiti. I took every art class that was available in my high school, and I also took every art class that my college offered. I eventually had endless requests to graffiti things for other people. I bought an airbrush in college and started making t-shirts and graffiti for commissions.

From there I explored as many forms of art as I could and I began to study art in my own time. I learned a lot about artists of the past and I became inspired by the Impressionists. I gained the ability to enjoy the process of creation without the standards of realism. At one point I had job in an art supply store, which opened my eyes to the vast variety of art supplies.

I’ve had a number of full time “careers” that led me to realize that having a job and a house and bills was not the life for me. When I moved to the West Coast, I got a job in Santa Monica creating digital artwork for hotels, casinos and restaurants.

That is when I learned that being an artist can actually be a full time job. I enjoyed making art everyday, but I also learned that being an artist does not pay well for most.

After spending a couple years in LA traffic Katie decided she wanted to fly to the other side of the world and backpack the Himalayas for 3 months… I gladly accepted the invitation. That was a life changing experience. I never imagined my life would take me to 18,000 ft on top of a mountain in Nepal.

When we got back from Nepal we moved to the central coast of California I continued to explore with new paints and learn more about painting. I showed my canvases in a number of art galleries and I participated in shows.

I received great feedback from my artwork, and people loved my canvases. But I never made enough money with my canvases to actually make a living, so I continued to find “career” type jobs. I worked many graphic design and web design jobs… sitting behind a computer screen at a desk. Society felt like a trap that I needed to escape from. Luckily for me, I am a creative problem solver driven to chase dreams. My dream was to be a successful artist, and to be completely self sufficient. My wife’s dream is to travel the world. I knew what our dreams were, but it took time to figure out how to make those dreams come true.

Eventually we moved to Humboldt aka “The Lost Coast” and I got another full-time job working at an apparel company where I learned the ins and outs of the screen printing process. At the time Lost Coast Longboarding was just a crazy idea that I came up with. I am a very hard worker, and after working in the real world for a number of years I realized that if I worked that hard towards my own dreams I was sure I could make enough to survive. I had ideas and creations in my head, and with a lot of work I eventually turned those thoughts into real things. We did not have much money to start a business, we had to make sacrifices that most people in America are not willing to make, simple things like not going out to eat, not having a tv/cable, video games, or deciding not to use the heater or air conditioner… basically, we learned to spend money only on things that are completely necessary.

We started Lost Coast Longboarding in a one bedroom apartment in Humboldt County as an attempt at freedom. We started with our own line of screen printed longboarding apparel, and since then our travel and experiences have led Lost Coast Longboarding to what it is today. We now travel the country full time and sell hand painted longboards which allows me to paint everyday!

By living on the road, we get ourselves in some pretty funny situations and we experience many things that I would never have expected. We are excited to share these experiences with you through our blog The Lost Longboarder.

About Katie

Hey there, I’m Katie! I grew up in Northern Indiana and moved to Los Angeles when I was 19. LA is different from Indiana in countless ways but what really stood out for me was all of the opportunities for hiking and being outdoors! Coming to a completely unfamiliar place provided many chances for exploration and I first felt the excitement of getting to see and experience totally new things.

A few years later on Venice Beach I met the man that, from that moment on, I get to share my explorations and excitement for life with. Shane and I share similar beliefs and values yet are different in all the right ways. I can go on and on about him but I’ll just say, he makes me so happy and his heart, attitude, drive, athleticism, and creativity continue to amaze me.

When Shane and I met, we both worked full time in Santa Monica. Spending forty hours a week apart (not including hours spent in LA traffic!) and sacrificing countless hours a week cutting into our adventures (not to mention being horribly routine) called for drastic changes! For about a year, we saved and planned, then when our lease was up we quit our jobs and left our apartment to go to backpack Nepal for three months.

It was our first time leaving the country and our first time backpacking! During our time in Nepal, we experienced so many firsts and saw unsurpassed beauty. We overcame many challenges and gained a new appreciation and understanding for life beyond what we left behind. After a successful, rewarding, and challenging three months I knew we could withstand whatever was thrown at us.

Our trip to Nepal was a very pivotal point for me, it made a life changing impression. Our travels to Nepal exposed to me a new sense of freedom and a heightened sense of adventure in the form of immersing myself in unfamiliarity. The unfamiliarity, challenges and constant exploration made me feel alive in ways that I never knew possible.

Needless to say, I brought back with me an awakening and a longing for adventure and freedom. At this point, I still didn’t fully understand my growth and didn’t know how to sustain that aliveness and passion. Upon our return I did the only thing I knew how to do at that point, I tried to reintegrate into regular society.

After Nepal, we moved to the central coast and then to the northern coast of California where we did the regular school, work, apartment thing. Both areas are absolutely beautiful and stunning places but for some reason I was always seeking somewhere else to move.

I was never completely satisfied with staying in one spot and got depressed spending hours at work and at school doing things that I didn’t enjoy and didn’t feel passionate about. I tried to fight it but I couldn’t ignore the pull towards all of the things that I’d rather be doing, things that made me happy and feel alive; travelling, exploring new areas, hiking, climbing and spending time adventuring together, seeing new things.

After realizing that apartment and job hopping were not the secret to my happiness, we made plans to hit the road.

And here we are! This lifestyle is perfect for me. There are still challenges and rough days but I feel more alive and free than ever before. Now we get to move at least every fourteen days and we get to take our house and business with us. No more rental applications, security deposits and leases. The scenery is always changing, our backyard is a new adventure, and if it’s too cold we move on (haha).

And best of all, working for ourselves allows us to spend our time together doing something we enjoy, wherever we happen to be. (If we put in forty hours a week, it’s for our gain not some corporation or some guy with six houses and twelve cars and more where that came from.) With this lifestyle, I feel joy and excitement, experience peace and solitude, and allow the challenges and experiences to shape me and make me wise. Being on the road is a constant adventure and I feel like myself more than ever before.

Now that I’ve told you a little about my personal journey and how this all came about, let me tell you a few things about what makes me who I am.

I live for the excitement of exploring somewhere new and I feel happiness when I am being active. I love hiking, backpacking, travelling, climbing, scrambling, working out and being outside. I love mountains, tree, rivers, rocks, canyons and lakes. Nature and all of its creatures amaze me and I’m thankful for all of my encounters with them (except mosquitos). I believe that there’s nothing better than being out on an adventure so beautiful that you catch yourself repeating “Wow.” out loud in pure amazement. I am solar powered and I do not enjoy being cold. I’m addicted to peanut butter and exploring. I recently started learning how to juggle. I dream of international travel. When I’m not adventuring I’m probably planning our next adventure, eating, or reading.

Thanks for reading about The Lost Longboarder blog, who we are, and what we do! If you have any questions or inquires please feel free to reach out to us by leaving a comment on any of our blog posts or send us an email! You can contact us here on our contact page.