Snow
I got up around 7 a.m. the morning of January 9, 2024 in Omaha, Nebraska and looked out the window of the motel I’d checked into the night before. It had continued snowing through the night and now there were a few inches of snow on and around my new Ford Transit Trail cargo van. I’d driven about four hours from Kansas City, Missouri the day before, thinking I’d return to Seattle after picking up the van at the dealership there. It was the first time I’d taken it on a cross-country trip, and a messy one it was, with light snow and a few semis and cars in the ditch en route. I didn’t know if I’d be required to have chains in order to get over the mountains between Omaha and Seattle, and there were reports that some might be impassable, requiring me to wait it out in the lowlands for an indeterminant number of days. I’d taken a leave of absence from my job at an Amazon warehouse, processing customer returns. It was less than 25 hours a week and paid about $100 a day, so could at least help defray a bit of the $88,000 loan I’d secured for the van. But after five minutes of consternation, my rebel side had had enough:
“Fuck this shit!,” I muttered. “I’m going to Florida.”
Thus began a new phase of my life. I’d been studying the various aspects of #vanlife ever since renting three cargo vans a couple years previous, and I’d just decided to throw caution to the wind and commit. I had no clear vision of how this experiment would turn out, but in that one rash moment I was off in a new direction, literally and figuratively.
Kansas City and Beyond
So, after breakfast I left the snowy parking lot and retraced the route to Gary Crossley Ford in Liberty, Missouri, the suburb of Kansas City where I’d picked up the van six days before. They had spread salt and sand on the highway which, while making the journey safer, ugly-fied my brand new vehicle. Oh well. The next day I found a truck wash which, for $35, would pressure wash up, down and under while you wait.
Oh Yeah…Plates
In my spontaneity I’d overlooked the fact that the dealership had already sent the necessary documents to my sister’s place in North Seattle, which is where I get mail. Luckily, Kayla (an admin at Crossley), suggested emailing my sister an overnight mail code so she could send everything back, since there were documents I had to sign and have notarized. We then sent the completed documents back to my sis, who took everything to the Department of Licensing. As soon as I was established somewhere in Florida, she would mail me the plates. Whew!
Fleeing Winter
A cold front still swept across the northern half of the country, so that even with the sleeping pad and three-season down bag I’d brought, it would have been dangerous to sleep in the back. So, with the help of Google Maps and the Booking.com app, I found cheap hotels to stay at during the trip south. Including the leg from Seattle to Kansas City, the three-thousand-mile route looked like this:
The Honda Civic Woman
The woman I’d sold my Honda Civic to in Kansas City called the evening I’d finally started eastward, saying that according to the local DMV, I/we had filled out the change of ownership “pink slip” wrong, and that we needed to redo it. So, the next morning I backtracked about 50 miles, met her at a fast food place, and re-signed everything. Then, on January 12, I was finally free to head toward the sun and away from the cold front that was freezing the top half of the country.
Orlando, Florida
I drove a fairly relaxed four hours each day, on average, leaving time to eat and find a hotel—passing through St. Louis, Missouri; Nashville, Tennessee; Macon, Georgia and Gainesville, Florida before arriving in Orlando on January 16th. Unsurprisingly, the app I’ve used the most throughout my journey has been Google Maps. For better prices and easier navigation I find places to stay on the outskirts of major towns. As handy as it is, it still takes considerable time and effort to check prices, ratings and reviews for hotels and restaurants; especially if you’re on the picky side, like me.
The OBT
Two years previously I had spent a month in Orlando waiting for an appointment at a consulate there to get a 4-year visa for Mexico (which is a different story). At that time I’d stayed mostly in a cheap hotel on the notorious Orange Blossom Trail. It was a funky place, but as I was the only one staying in the wing at the far end of the property, it was quiet. This time, however, things did not work out well there, so I shifted to the Orlando Palms, a few blocks away, and was lucky to get a decent room close to reception.
Bed
The first thing I decided to install in my new van was a bed. I’d already watched a couple hundred YouTube videos by other vanlifers and discovered one of the easiest ways to make a bed platform is with telescoping aluminum beams from IKEA.
These are called “SKORVA Center support beam” on their site and are only $15 each. There’s a hook on each end that grabs onto the “SEKTION Suspension rail” ($18), that you attach to the sides of the van.
Plus Nuts
There are a lot of pre-existing holes in the walls and ceiling of the van and—as much as possible—I wanted to avoid drilling any new ones. So I had to learn about rivet nuts and a variant called plus nuts (or cross nuts), which allow you to put a threaded metal plug into a hole in sheet metal. This project took way longer than I’d imagined, as I discovered none of the five hardware stores in the area had them, nor the tool to attach them. I ended up getting the plus nuts from a company called McMaster-Carr (which has totally amazing service), and the tool to attach them from Amazon.
(Incidentally, a Canadian named Antoine has a van-related site called Far Out Ride, and has done a ridiculous amount of study on rivnuts and plus nuts, including on how to keep them from spinning after insertion.)
MakerFX
At this point I have to discuss the modern phenomenon of the makerspace—something I first heard about through an old high school friend on Facebook. She’s quite involved in her local community and had posted about how some of the kids she was helping were building things at a local “makerspace.” Wikipedia says,
“A makerspace (or “hackerspace”), is a community-operated, often ‘not for profit’ workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate.”
I’d found a few in the Seattle area, so thought there might also be one in Orlando, which turned out to be correct. After attending one of the Saturday orientations, for a mere $50 per month, I had 24/7 access to MakerFX’s big, air-conditioned facility in a quiet business park just fifteen minutes from where I was staying. Besides having a complete woodshop, they had restrooms, a refrigerator, meeting room, etc., which are all incredibly handy for someone soon to be living out of a van.
CNC Routed Vent Boards
One of the other members at MakerFX volunteered to help me with my van. His name was Steve and he knew how to use many of the machines, computers, etc. on site. Within just a few minutes he made a program for the CNC (computer numerical control), router to create some vent holes in the half-inch birch plywood I’d bought. Then I put a couple coats of polyurethane on them and added some adhesive Velcro strips on the boards and aluminum beams to hold them in place.
Steve had the brilliant idea of adding small pine blocks on the edges to lock the platform into the side rails.
Mattress
After the platform was ready, I got a memory foam mattress from Amazon delivered to my hotel. It was a “full” size mattress and I only had to cut the ends at an angle to get the entire 6′ 3″ length to fit from side to side (what van people call “east-west” orientation). I also knotched it to fit around the pillars in back of the van. After putting its zip cover back on, plus sheets and a quilt, it became a very comfortable bed that I’ve been completely happy with.
Blackout Window Covers
So, now I could sleep in the van, but I still wasn’t ready to without window covers, which serve two functions:
- keep prying eyes out, and
- keep light inside the van from showing someone is inside at night
I got six midrange (about $100 each), covers from a company called VanEssential that are custom made for my van. (Many try making their own but are usually disappointed and wish they’d just plopped for the professionally made ones.) They have magnets in the perimeter that stick to the metal edges of the windows and fold up when you’re not using them. They work well and overall I’ve been happy with them. However, being black on the exterior side, they seem to work like a heat magnet in direct sunlight, amplifying the heat. But maybe if they were white or some reflective material, they wouldn’t be as stealthy?
Stealth
If there’s one subject in van forums that brings out the trolls, it’s stealth.
The site Nomad Life says:
“In the context of nomadic living, stealth is the ability to pass for an unoccupied, non-residential vehicle when needed, so that you can find a place to park and sleep in it with no one knowing.”
For example, few people would suspect someone is living in a van that looks like this:
In contrast, it’s easy to imagine someone living in a van that looks like this:
My van is somewhere in between. The Ford Transit Trail model (new for 2023), was specifically made to be turned into a camper van and comes with a 3.5″ lift to accommodate larger hybrid tires and has windows in back and on the sliding door (among other things). And, I’ve already added an air conditioner and vent fan on the roof. Still, I think it looks pretty unassuming. I may add a couple small solar panels on the roof in the future, but I really want to avoid having stuff hangin off the back or sides like a ladder or bike rack. I also went with white partly to look generic (but also because it fits my preference for the classic, minimalist and simple).
Anyhow, no matter how stealthy your rig looks, the main point is not to be an eyesore (like unfortunately many vans out there are), and to be respectful wherever you decide to park for the night. If you arrive after dark, leave early in the morning, are quiet and don’t leave trash, then as long as you’re not on private property and not blocking anything, few people would object.
The Knock
Speaking of which, everyone talks about getting the knock. That is, having someone rap on the side of your van at night to tell you you need to move. From what I’ve read online, it happens rarely. It hasn’t happened to me yet, though I did have one small incident in a hospital parking lot in Portland, Maine, when a security guard came over just as I was about to leave in the morning.
At first, he said he’d noticed I was there overnight and since it was a private hospital, was not allowed unless I was a patient. But after I told him I was headed to New York and he saw my Washington plates, he changed the subject to his time in the navy in Seattle. Still, he was unpleasant at first, and it made me think hospital parking lots were not one of the better options; which until then, they had seemed to be. (I probably just need to make sure it’s a big, public hospital….)
My preferred parking spot at this point is in a middle-class neighborhood. Ritzy residential areas often don’t have street parking, and may have no-parking signs and higher security. Poorer areas, on the other hand, are often scary looking. The Goldilocks Zone is a medium income area, with some space between houses and a few cars already parked on the street. If you park overnight in a place like this, who’s to say you aren’t the friend of some neighbor visiting from out of town?
Electrical System
Type of Victron-based component system that’s popular with vanlifers:
Daunted
I’d noticed many people had built component-based systems using blue boxes from Victron, which is a Dutch company known for making reliable marine electronics. A YouTuber named Nate Yarbrough has a site called Explorist.life and posts lots of info about how to build van electrical systems like the one pictured above. He sells kits which include things like the following:
- lithium batteries
- inverter/charger unit
- shunt (voltage monitor)
- solar charge controller
- DC-to-DC charger
- LCD control panel
- bluetooth connection module
- fuse panels
- circuit breakers
- power inlet
- AC and DC outlets
- large copper wire
- smaller copper wire
Then you would also need:
- lugs, ferrules, ring terminals
- wire tie-downs
- crimping tool
- wire stripper and cutter
heat shrink - heat gun
- volt/amp meter
If you buy his kit and instructions and make it in the cabinet that he shows how to build in another of his videos, well yes, it’s possible to make a robust system.
But to me, this seemed way more complicated than it needed to be, just to power some lights, a fan, induction burner, and charge my phone.
All-In-One System
After more research my first inclination was to go with an all-in-one electrical system