The great American road trip is alive and well in Glacier National Park this summer. Many travelers are turning to converted camper vans.

For Jo and Franz Zillner of Wisconsin, their van is a home away from home. They recently took their second trip to Glacier and said their Ford van, which they customized themselves, allows them to travel comfortably and visit family in Washington and Texas.

"It gives us the ability to see this great country," Franz Zillner said. They were parked at Lake McDonald, had their inflatable boat inspected and vacuumed out by Park Service staff and were heading out to kayak on the lake.

They said they took a break from travel last summer because of the pandemic — several campgrounds in Utah closed down — but this summer they've been hitting the road.

The Zillners are national park aficionados and plan to visit every park in the United States eventually.

JAKE FORBES is traveling solo in his four-wheel-drive Ford Econoline. The Californian originally bought the van to go to Mexico and surf, but things got a little hairy down south during the pandemic.

"So I said, 'Let's tour the Midwest and see how long I can go,'" he said while camped at Apgar.

He'd been on the road a month, traveling through Oregon and Washington, and his last stop was a visit with friends in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, for a week. He decided to swing up to Glacier before heading south to visit friends in Colorado. He said he might go home or go to Texas and visit friends there.

He works for a a financial app called Acorns, so he can work while he's on the road, he said. He just needs Wi-Fi and a table.

"I can work from anywhere," he said. "It's a blessing."

With things shut down last year, Forbes is far from alone.

Anecdotally, the Hungry Horse News has seen more out-of-state license plates in Glacier this summer than ever before.

Even states like Maine, Florida and New York aren't all that uncommon this summer.

TODD AND Sydney Minoski are among those long-distance travelers. They're also living the van life, but theirs is a vintage 1964 Dodge A100.

They'd driven from Pennsylvania to visit Glacier.

Minoski rebuilt the van's engine and it ran pretty well, with the exception of a fan failure in traffic in Chicago, of all places. Amid the horrendous traffic, they managed to get the van across four lanes of traffic and to an auto-parts store where they bought not one replacement fan, but two.

While custom vans such as Mercedes Sprinters can cost as much as $180,000, Minoski bought two A100s for $1,300.

Other than the Chicago breakdown the trip has been fun, the couple said.

"It's been an adventure," they said.