Jason and I have been through several iterations in our car camping setup. We started with the Roof top tent on our old Silverado. It worked awesome and the canopy gave us a ton of storage. The tent was super high off the ground which made it feel really safe from animals, but it was also really hard for me to help set up and take down without crawling all over the truck. On the first day of our very first road trip with our new canopy, we got an hour down the road and noticed stress fractures all throughout the aluminum rack. We headed home, bought steel, fabbed a new one, and then continued our adventure!
Next up, in a fit of extreme poor decision making we traded our trusty Silverado in on a Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk. It was a nice little SUV. It drove nice and did surprisingly well offroad, but it just didn’t have the interior volume of storage that we needed (along with some electronic shadiness that I didn’t care for which is why we didn’t keep it!). That prompted us to build one of those super cool offroad cargo trailers. It had axle-less high travel suspension, an articulating hitch, two separate compartments, and a roof rack for the tent!
The above photo shows the reality of camping and living out of a 6’x4’x3′ metal box. We keep all of our food and supplies in tubs. There’s a drop down table, which was an upgrade from the “tailgating” that happened with the Silverado, but it’s still pretty much anarchy at dinnertime. There’s no place to cook food or hang out that’s dry and warm.
I was pretty pleased with our build of the trailer. (which can be seen here!) Eventually, we realized that the Jeep just wasn’t the right vehicle for us and purchased a Chevy Colorado! We didn’t want to deal with the weight of the canopy again, so we whipped up a small bed rack out of some angle iron (this happens surprisingly often…) and just set our trusty roof top tent on the back of the truck bed! Easy! We even upgraded our storage tubs to something with more substantial lids so they didn’t fly off. We’re still digging them out of the back of the truck, but we don’t have to deal with towing anything, which simplifies things quite a bit!
As shown above, there is one major downside to sleeping in a tent. If it rains, you get rained on. If it snows, you get snowed on. :/ The tent itself sleeps really warm and our sleeping bags are amazing, but there’s no getting away from losing fingers trying to shove that icy mess back into its bag so you can drive into town and get coffee.
The discussion that occurred on the drive from Donner Pass, CA (yeah, THAT Donner pass…) down to Truckee to get breakfast burritos was when Jason and I decided that we want a camper that we could sleep in, eat in, AND maybe even heat if we wanted to! I bet I still have the sad little sketches that my frozen fingers created on that trip.
That brings us to the title of this blog post. What are we up to now? Well, we’re getting a truck camper! We looked into all of the commercially available truck campers on the market and aside from being about $10k too expensive (seriously.. shit’s ridiculous) they’re also at or over the payload of the truck as a bare shell. We didn’t want some 1500#+ thing in the back of our truck bed with the offroad places we like to go. So here we are, over a year later with plans to build our own pop up truck camper.
Stay tuned, because you know when Jason and I latch onto an idea, we’re going to do *something* interesting…