THE stream, burbling and gleaming with newness, was racing down the mountain just below its birthplace at the Continental Divide. No animal foot or errant petrochemical or human hand had yet touched this glistening water, still chilled from the snow it had melted out of a few minutes before. We would be the first.  Want to turn your mini-van into an RV and hit the road? The author will be answering reader questions until Sept. 4. Submit your questions and comments here.  About two feet wide, it was easy to dip into, once we’d left our van by the road and clambered up through scratchy, interlacing brush. No one was in sight; there was no sound but the rushing water and the wind. “Drink some!” my husband, Pat, insisted. “Bend down and cup your hands.” And flouting all the conventional wisdom about never drinking from a stream, I did.  It was cold and sweet, primordially clean  exhilarating. But what would you expect from the freshest drink on the continent?  We were in Colorado, on Day 4 of a cross-country road trip. Just before, we had stopped at Loveland Pass, 12,000 feet up, where a sign marks the Divide and tourists gaze out over the Rockies and down at flagpole-straight pines. In a pocket meadow, optimistic teenagers were snowboarding on a shrunken July snow patch. Tourists explained to one another that rain falling back where we’d come from on Route 6 would drop toward the Mississippi River, while ahead of us it was destined for the Pacific Coast. As were we.  It’s a big, beautiful country and a familiar dream: set out across the United States in your own vehicle, on your own terms. Drive where you want to. Pull over when you want to. See a lot of what you’ve always heard about and plenty of what you haven’t. Just how common the dream I discovered when I began telling people about our plans. Over and over, people said, “I’ve always wanted to do that,” and then, wistfully, “But I never have the time.”  We didn’t have the time, either. Two weeks’ vacation in the heart of summer  that was it. Not a lot of leisure for driving six or seven thousand miles. But we did it anyway, and here’s what we learned: You can see a lot of this country in 14 days. And it’s every bit as much fun as you thought it would be.  What made it work for us was a used 2006 Toyota Sienna minivan, which we converted with minimal effort from soccer-mom special to RV Lite. It has privacy-protecting tinted glass and enough room  if you take out both rows of back seats  for two people to roll out foam pads and sleep, and store things besides. Yes, quarters were a little tight. True, not everyone would be thrilled with the portable toilet, space-saving and odor-neutralizing marvel though it was. And two people living together in a minivan had better be in love.  But the van, a camper masquerading as a family car, gave us flexibility. We had a commitment in California, a reunion at Stanford University that would occupy three of our precious days, but still we wanted leeway for spontaneity. With the van, we could stay in a campground, in an urban hotel and even in a Wal-Mart parking lot. (All of which we did.) We didn’t have to do a lot of complicated planning or keep to a tight schedule. Unlike the car campers we saw, we were always out of the rain and walled off from lurking grizzlies. Unlike the RV-ers, we weren’t burdened by a big, expensive rig. And on the long stretches, we were getting 30 miles per gallon. (Honest. We kept track.)  The Wal-Mart accommodations came the first night out, after a day of boring Interstate driving from our home east of Buffalo to western Illinois. Neither of us had camped in years, and we hadn’t thought to make sure someone would be on hand at our rural private campground (optimistically reserved, unrecommended, on the Internet) if we arrived late. The office was empty, the door locked, and with no one to assign us a campsite, we wandered aimlessly in the dark, passing tents occupied by cheerful families and shabby trailers that appeared permanently moored, before giving up. The nearby Wal-Mart parking lot was fine  and free. We slept well and awoke to birdsong and the slam of the store manager’s car door as she arrived at 6 a.m. for her day of work.  On a quiet Sunday morning, with the world not quite awake, the last 20 or 30 miles to the Mississippi were Edenic: lifting mists, lush vegetation, land so flat it seemed to merge almost seamlessly into the calm Rock River running alongside the highway. We crossed the Mississippi, and the van sped smoothly under a baking sun west to Des Moines, south to Kansas City and then southwest into the Flint Hills, where we’d come to see the prairie.  THE farmers who plowed up most of the American Midwest spared the Flint Hills, which in aerial photos look like immense green ocean swells, because the rock was too close to the surface for plows. The buffalo were replaced by cattle, but in an area roughly the size of Vermont, the tallgrass prairie survives, a remnant of what most of the midsection of North America once must have looked like.  BARBARA IRELAND is the deputy editor of the Travel section of The Times.
With limited time, a tight budget, and a minivan as overnight lodging, a couple make their way across the country, fulfilling a dream for both.