The Beginning

Taking delivery of a dream during a nightmare

Starting in 2012, my camping rig was a 2011 Nissan pickup with a camper shell mounted over the bed. I had built a sleeping platform, with gear storage beneath it, for the interior of the shell, and my partner Leslie and I used it on many memorable trips of varying duration and off-grid intensity across the West. The truck supplanted the succession of tents that sheltered me during more than 50 years of camping trips, a concession to comfort and convenience that also broadened the range of places I could sleep overnight.

At some point, however, climbing a stepladder and crawling into and out of bed, sometimes in total darkness  — and conducting all kitchen and other camp business outdoors regardless of weather or hours of sunlight — got old. And so did we. It was no longer just inconvenient but somewhat dangerous to clamber awkwardly out of the camper and feel around in the dark for the top ladder step in order to take a midnight pee break. Given that retirement, and lots of hoped-for travel, was on the horizon, we decided in 2019 that it was time for something we could just walk in to and out of, safely upright. We investigated several options and decided a four-wheel-drive van converted into a camper would best meet our needs — off-grid and off-highway capability, maneuverability, comfort (but not to a lavish degree). 

The pickup, off the grid near Goblin Valley State Park in Utah.

After spending most of  the year researching camper van conversion companies, we settled on Portland-based Outside Van, drawn by the quality of their builds and the harmony between what we planned to do with the van, our aesthetic preferences and their team’s design style. We first reached out to them in late October 2019, filling out a rough wish list of features using a form on their website, then signed a contract and placed an initial deposit in November. After that, we began working with the designer assigned to our project to nail down the project details.

We put down deposits on the van purchase and the conversion in December 2019, finalized the overall design in January 2020, and paid the balance in full for the van and conversion in February. Our van, a 2019 Mercedes Sprinter, was in line for start of production in July, so we planned a visit to the Portland OV shop in April to tour the production line, and finalize our choices of fabrics and other materials for the interior.

And then….

Yeah. On March 14, I sent Nick Abbott, our project designer at OV, an email saying that, considering the circumstances — California and Oregon both in a version of COVID-19 lockdown — we would be indefinitely postponing our visit. The remaining design work took place via email, Zoom calls and FedExed swatches of fabric and laminate. The van entered the OV shop ahead of schedule, on May 22, with an estimated completion date four months later. We began mapping out a tentative itinerary for the journey north to pick it up and to commence our inaugural trip in it during the fall, hands-down the best season for travel in the West.

But first, we regressed to tent camping. I gave the pickup to my son, Daniel, upon his graduation in mid-May from a three-year doctoral program in physical therapy at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He and his fiancé, Dakota, are avid outdoors people, his aging Subaru wagon was on life support, and the pickup would soon be superfluous in my life. Best that they take advantage of the work I put into making the Frontier a mobile home. But Leslie and I could not wait to get outside until the van was completed. Like countless other Californians locked in by the pandemic, we needed to see trees instead of Zoom screens, mountains instead of the walls inside our houses.

So, during the summer we managed two car-camping excursions. The first featured a pair of trans-Sierra Nevada crossings, from west to east over Sonora Pass to legendary Highway 395, then east to west over Ebbetts and Monitor passes.

The second excursion included an overnight backpacking trip in the Central Sierra’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness. There, camped on the shore of Bull Run Lake the evening of Aug. 16, we watched distant flickers of lightning above the Sierra crest for more than an hour, an entertaining display of silent beauty. We did not know it at the time, but the spectacle was part of an epic outbreak of thunderstorms that over 72 hours ignited 650 wildfires across Northern and Central California. Eventually, driven by gale-force winds, they would merge into several mega-fires that would continue to burn for months, incinerating more than 4 million acres and shrouding cities from San Francisco to Portland in thick smoke.

The next month was a double nightmare for California, disaster layered on top of disaster. Those lightning-sparked fires were still burning, as were wildfires in Oregon, Washington and other Western states, when we got word that our van would be ready for pickup in Portland on Sept. 22. By this time, the sheer absurdity of what we were about to do had become obvious: We were proposing to drive a thousand-mile gantlet of smoke and fire to a city experiencing the worst air quality conditions on the planet, to pick up a camper van we would then spend a week or so driving and living in on our way back from Oregon — during a pandemic.

But there was no other way to retrieve the van. A new conversion rolls off the line about every three days at Outside Van. We would have to come get it.

We left Ventura on Sept. 20 in a rented SUV stuffed full of all the camping gear we planned to transfer to the van. It took two days, with an overnight in a motel in Red Bluff, to reach Portland, where we stopped to pick up an inflatable kayak we’d rented. We then drove to Hood River, where we checked into a bed-and-breakfast. The next day we met my son and Dakota for a morning of kayaking on the nearby White Salmon River.

That morning on the White Salmon was magical, all sunshine and sparkling water and green forest. Daniel is an expert hardshell kayaker, and Dakota has picked it up quickly; both are far more skilled than the crew of the double IK. Whitewater in the section we ran is forgiving for beginners and rusty boaters, however, so Les and I enjoyed ourselves. The river is walled by dense evergreens, with scattered deciduous hardwoods providing bright pops of autumn color in openings along the water. After we shuttled back to the put in, we shared a distanced picnic lunch in a scattered grove of trees.

The next day, we drove back to Portland under increasingly cloudy skies, dropped off the rented kayak and gear, and headed to Outside Van to meet our new home on wheels.

The shop is in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city, just east of Portland International Airport and south of the Columbia River. We were greeted outside the front door by Tom Ratts, service and warranty manager, who led us through a warren of offices and hallways into the shop.

Our van was waiting for us, facing an open roll-up door, gleaming under the shop lights like a burly spaceship.

It’s hard to describe the emotional power of that moment. We had never seen the van in person, never test-driven it, and had been provided only awkward pre-conversion snapshots taken in the parking lot outside to convey its appearance. Despite our pleading, OV stuck to its policy of prohibiting photos and videos of conversions in progress, so we had plunked down a ton of money and spent months in design consultation, dreaming and waiting without ever seeing photographic confirmation that the process we had commissioned was proceeding according to our plan.

All the van doors were closed, although the interior cabin lights were on, and Tom led us around the outside of the van for the longest time, meticulously introducing us to such mundane features as the water tank filler cap, the shore-power plug and DEF tank under the hood, the drain plug for the galley sink.

Having adequately built our suspense, he positioned us in front of the big sliding door, pressed a button on the key fob, and revealed the interior of the van to us. We both gasped, and found ourselves tearfully hugging. It was even more beautiful than we had imagined, and our plans had been executed perfectly down to the last detail.

The full orientation took about an hour and a half. There are so many systems — the complexity should not have come as a surprise; it is after all, a vehicle and a house rolled into one — and in the end we absorbed only about half the information Tom delivered to us. Fortunately, I took notes and he handed us a thick folder with all the owner’s manuals before we left.

When it came time to drive it out of the shop, we discovered that a light rain had begun falling, the leading edge of a significant system moving into the Pacific Northwest. The OV team had detailed the van beautifully, but we did not get to enjoy its pristine state very long. Leslie drove it out the door and parked next to our rental. We quickly transferred all our gear, barely bothering to organize it as we rushed to finish before everything got wet.

We drove to the nearby car rental lot where we’d arrange to drop the SUV, fighting dense traffic and rain in an utterly unfamiliar and very large vehicle, and then headed east toward Hood River, where we planned to visit Daniel and Dakota again before spending the night camping at a nearby county park.

The remainder of our shakedown cruise was magical. To avoid smoke and fire, we headed east across Oregon and into Idaho, before heading south into Utah. Over the course of two weeks we covered 2,400 miles, most of it spent in the redrock canyon country, getting to know the van and testing its capabilities. (Click here to view an album of photos from the trip.) We hiked canyons, visited Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites, and camped off dirt roads with no one else in sight.

When we finally completed the long drive home, we could not wait to go out again.

Next Chapter at its first campsite, along the Hood River in Oregon.