We are five days into the summer shakedown trip and the van build is holding up well. How’s “vanlife” you ask? Well, there are things we love, things we don’t love quite so much, and systems that are still… let’s say “in development”.
Although we are experienced car campers (sooo many years of car camping!) we are still van-camping newbies and figuring out the basics of how to live comfortably in our van.
How’s it going? Here’s the good, the bad and the “in development”
The Good
Nothing has ACTUALLY Shaken down! A testament to Dan’s hard work and skill.
We (still) love our van! We don’t even mind that– in these midwest, buttoned-down campgrounds full of spit-shined RVs– it looks “vaguely menacing”. After all, on occasion, Dan looks “vaguely menacing” too.
We are considering that the name of our van might, in fact, BE “Vaguely Menacing Van” (Though I am currently partial to “Pepper”) Anyway, good thing number one is that we still love the van. We are happy that it is not showy or fancy or expensive. Check out how gritty we look next to a sleeker vanlife model
Another good thing is that the bed in the van is super comfortable! We have not been too cold or too hot (Thank you, Maxxair fan!) and we have parked on a tilt and still felt comfy sleeping inside. The bed isn’t too hard to make up. Though it WOULD be if we tried to be stealthy and made it from inside with the doors closed. Our current system involves one of us standing outside at the back doors and one working from inside.
Another nice bed feature, is the Ikea book pockets Dan installed on either side. We envisioned these as bedside tables and they work great!
We also love our “glampy” screenhouse which has made our journey (so far) feel less like a camping trip and more like “home”. It not hard to put up the screenhouse and increases our living space tremendously. We were worried about fitting it into the van’s limited storage, but it turns out to fit pretty easily under one of our benches. likewise for the folding table that we are using. We can envision these being super nice when we are camped for longer stretches out west or in a light drizzle.
The “coffee basket”. I (Perri) am serious about my morning coffee. Our coffee basket set up has made our mornings a bit more relaxing. The coffee basket contains: Our teeny backpacking stove, a bag of ground espresso roast coffee, a table spoon, coffee filters and cone, a mason jar of brown sugar cubes, and two ceramic coffee mugs from home. We have a tiny tea kettle that is stored beside it. Upon waking, the only thing we need to remember, beside the basket, is the cream/oat milk.
Free Parks are everywhere! We have really enjoyed stopping for lunch at town centers and baseball diamonds in the small towns of Illinois and Iowa. Many have tables and bathrooms and shade a plenty.
Camping apps! We have used both ioverlander and campendium to find out of the way spots to camp with great luck. We have used these apps to plan every stop so far. And just discovered freeroam, which has even more options to check out.
Our first night was a lovely little pond in New York State, free and quiet, and not too far off the highway.
Our second site was a $6 campground in Illinois, also super quiet with hiking trails through the state forest. It wasn’t remarkable, but it was cheap and peaceful and had a clean pit toilet.
Next, we stayed at a State Park in Iowa with a lovely view of a large lake and great rockhounding opportunities. It was NOT so quiet– there were a few mid-week RVs around– but the tent area was totally empty. We put up our screen house and hammock out there and slept in the van.
I am writing this from another Iowa site, a state recreation area. It, too, is understated and super quiet. There’s a lake with white pelicans in it(!) and it was $10.
Once we are a little farther west, we will look for free dispersed camping, but for now $10 (shower and toilet included) and taking it slow has worked beautifully.
The Bad
Gas mileage. Our (beloved) van gets 14 miles per gallon. With a 30 gallon tank, it currently costs about $125 to fill her up. And takes 6-7 hours of constant driving to drain the tank. Ugh! In response, we have slowed down our travel, keeping to 55 mph (well…. 62ish) and driving back roads rather than those long, rolling mid-west highways that could turn anybody into a speed demon. Also, we are staying put longer… even though we are in the long, shade-starved rolling mid-west landscape in the heat of July. The shakedown trip is taking on a whole new meaning as we are being shaken down every few days for gas money.
The Squeak. By Illinois, our van had a troubling squeak coming from the back right tire. We had to make a stop in Macomb, IL to diagnose the problem. The awesome folks at the shop we found clearly knew their Ford from their Fiat, and diagnosed the squeak as a sticky emergency break. Unfortunately, they were not able to fit us in so we are still looking to get this fixed. It is not smoking though, or constant, so it could be worse, right? We called our mechanic back home and he suggested we “hit the ebrake with a hammer a couple times” which we did. But perhaps we did this too lightly as the squeak continues.
In Development:
Bench storage. When packing the van, we neglected to think about what would/would not be accessible when we turned our bench seating into our bed for the night. One of the things we packed under there was our bag of toiletries. It took two of us, comntorted on the floor of the van, to fish our toothbrushes out without unmaking the bed. Lesson learned. We are working on packing what is needed more often near the back of the storage so that we can reach it through the back “hatches”. However, MANY things are needed and there is only so much room.
Kitchen. When we built our van, we envisioned setting up our folding table on the ground beside our “barn doors”, with everything more or less in reach. We have yet to do so. The campgrounds we’ve stayed at are not designed for our “kitchen set up” and so we have been toting items back and forth from the van to the picnic table at our “tent site”.
Why don’t you cook in the van, you ask? After all, YouTube is chock full of videos of handsome young folks cooking delicious meals in their vans. We never planned to cook inside our van. It is a low top, and the idea of all those food smells and splatters in our low, tiny space… just, no.
We set up our kitchen so that almost everything would be accessible from just outside the doors. (The idea here is living OUT of the van rather than living IN the van…) But if we are not set up right beside the van, cooking is a frustrating relay race, back, forth, up into the van, hunt around in the cupboards. Ugh, forgot something! Repeat.
When the kids were little, we had a “dinner box” full of all the food and equipment we’d need for dinner, and we would truck that one box out to the picnic table at our site and, more or less, be set up. Dan and I may have to go back to a system like this or some new arrangement to suit the kitchen we have. Anyway, in development.
All in all were learning a lot!
I love reading about your adventures!
Sounds like real EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING!
Hi Mandy! Expeditionary indeed! We’ll post more as we get into the swing of things. So glad to have you along with us– missing 4R already!