Transit
Most of this life happens in places nobody would bother romanticizing if they were trying to sell it. That does not make those places unimportant. It makes them structural.
Truck stops, edge-of-town store lots, casino overflow, industrial streets that go quiet after ten. The road is full of places designed for transit rather than presence, which is exactly why we keep using them.
Most van-life imagery pretends that the structure of the life is scenic. It is not. The structure is logistical. The beauty comes in flashes between practical problems, and if you cannot tolerate the practical part you mostly just like the poster.
Parking lots are useful because they flatten social expectation. Nobody is having a transcendent experience there, which means you are free to be ordinary too. The van becomes anonymous infrastructure. That anonymity is not romantic, but it is often the thing that makes rest possible.
I photograph these spaces because they are part of the truth of the arrangement. The road is not all red rock and empty vistas. A lot of it is sodium vapor, shopping carts, and trying to infer safety from a badly lit curb line.