We are BIIIIIG planners. We plan every little inch of our lives, and are mostly able to stick to it. If there comes an evening where we don’t have any plans (forget about a blank weekend on the calendar) we end up feeling like we’re on vacation and we watch TV or do something equally lazy.
To me, the purpose of this trip is to plan out a really long time where we don’t have any plans. I’ve tried to approach it with an attitude of “I don’t know what/when/how, and that’s ok.” Obviously we’ve concocted a rough route and timeline, and there’s no way we could go camping on and off for a year without some forethought, but the idea is to not think about the specifics until they happen. Purposefully setup as many situations as possible where we don’t need to know what we’re going to do to get by. I hope that this makes it so that we can slow down, smell the proverbial flowers, you know? Experience entire days where we just enjoy the great outdoors, a nice hike, and each other’s company.
But we’re not there yet: right now I’m frantically trying to get everything sorted to make it happen. So on that note, I’d like to share some of the plans we’ve made. Meet Snowball: our horse for this rodeo.
She’s a 1996 Toyota Land Cruiser with almost 300k miles we bought a couple years ago. In some ways, she was the spark of this adventure. At the very least, she influenced our ideas about how we want to go about it (“We have a baller Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, let’s just camp!”). A large part of the planning process consisted of thinking about how we wanted to outfit her to be optimally suited to all the different functions. It’s been really fun to see Jess so involved in looking up what others have done to their trucks and toying with the ideas to fit our needs. As engineers, we love a set of boundary conditions inside which we can creatively design.
Probably the biggest effort I’ve been in charge of is how to build the rear interior once we removed the seats. We had quite a few goals: Bee needs a place to sit that isn’t our laps; we need an emergency platform for a bed in case we can’t put up the tent; we want a convenient place for the cooler (possibly a drawer?); and we need to maximize storage space for all the stuff we’re bringing.
We went through quite a few ideas and settled on the chicken-scratch blueprints below. It’s a steel frame with a single drawer that pulls out the back.
We’re using steel (as opposed to wood) because I think we need a big weight-to-strength ratio. A drawer will make it easier to get to the stuff in the back without having to put anything on the ground outside. Here is the link to the 500lb drawer slides we bought: link.
We might use a 24″ drawer for the cooler out the side door too, we don’t know yet.
The metal is ordered and we plan to start welding this Sunday. Should be fun, can’t wait to see how it turns out!
"Purposefully Unrushed" 