The Rig

The Rig: Chrysler minivan with Thule car top carrier.

Before you start getting trip updates from Vicky and me (we haven't left yet!), I'll tell you bit about our road accommodations, which I call The Rig. First, let me tell you what we didn't do. We started thinking about how we would take long road trips a few years ago. We looked at many options. Rejected right away were options that required us to buy a powerful new vehicle to tow our home on the road. We looked at medium sized trailers and pop-ups. We looked at buying an RV, renting an RV, converting a van, and doing a sophisticated minivan conversion. We stacked up the pros and cons of each, from cost to convenience. We looked at it from the point of view of how we thought we'd like to travel: in a medium sized vehicle, without a tow, with road accommodations that were comfortable and easy to set up. We also took our age into account.

We decided on doing a low-cost minivan conversion. Something we could easily put in a minivan, but which we could just as easily remove for the majority of the time when we weren't traveling. So, in 2019, we bought an almost-new Chrysler minivan. All of the back seats of the minivan easily stow under the floor of the car. Next, we determined how we would make the bed and carry all our stuff. Vicky was instrumental in figuring all of this out. She pointed me to various Pinterest pages where people posted pictures of their own set-ups. After whittling down the ideas, we decided to make a simple raised platform out of PVC pipe to place a mattress on. The space below the bed would be used for storage. I borrowed a neighbor's miter saw a couple of summers ago and cut all the needed pieces. The hard part was finding the various PVC joints to piece it all together. They weren't available at my local big box hardware stores in the sizes I needed, so I went to an online PVC outlet. On top of the PVC skeleton, I placed a sheet of plywood and a thin sheet of sub-flooring (not as rough on the mattress as the plywood surface). The entire platform can be assembled for a trip in about a half an hour. When not in use, I store the PVC sections in a plastic box and the plywood and sub-flooring sheets against a wall of my garage. 

The mattress was a find. A 4'X6' 4-inch thick, reasonably stiff foam mattress. It's exactly wide enough to fit in the minivan, and long enough for me so that just my toes dangle off the end. On top of the mattress, we put another cut-to-size piece of softer foam, just in case. The bed platform is pulled all the way to the back of the minivan. It's easy to get in and out of the bed through the side doors of the minivan. We sleep with our feet toward the front of the minivan. There's about another foot or so of space in front of the platform to put a few things that won't fit under the platform, or that we'd need quick access to on the road. Primary among these things is a cooler. Other things we did for sleeping privacy and comfort: We got fitted window coverings, including opaque screens for ventilation; We also have a rechargeable battery-operated fan to move air around. 

PVC bed platform with empty storage area

Bed with rechargeable battery-operated fan attached to a headrest. 

We sleep with feet toward the front for easy egress through side doors.

The fitted window screens and coverings are not shown.

There's enough space under the bed platform to put several boxes and bags for food, clothes, and other supplies. Vicky is the ultimate organizer. She has always been great at what I called the "inverse fishes and loaves problem": how to pack a seemingly impossible amount of stuff into a small volume, But in the past, these packing problems always presented themselves when we were going to one place for a long week and would unpack it all when we got there. On this trip, we'd be packing and unpacking needed items on an almost daily basis, and so we wanted easy access to the stuff we needed most. For this reason, we decided to be a bit minimalist. We don't want to do laundry every other day, so we need to pack a lot of clothes. But we don't need to have 10 days worth of a lot of other stuff, such as food. Vicky spent a lot of time figuring out what we'd need day to day and how to pack it in an optimal manner. Most of our packed meals will be easy breakfasts of coffee and maybe eggs or oatmeal. We'll do on-the-road lunches, and either dinner out or easy camp meals. So, just a medium-sized cooler is all we figured we'd need.

The platform bed with storage stowed

Side view of bed and storage showing space in front of bed for cooler, etc.

A couple of years ago, we invested in a Thule car top carrier. We got one of the larger ones, and it is nice. Not just because of the size, but because it's pretty easy to put on and secure to the minivan. Those Swedes are clever, and not just in making apartment furniture. The hardest part about securing it to the minivan is getting it on top of the minivan. I do it solo because Vicky is too short to help. And even this old guy can horse it up there without too much trouble because, despite the size, it's very lightweight. In the Thule is where we put the bigger stuff that won't fit under the bed platform: a pavilion tent to shelter our picnic table, a Coleman propane stove, a small camp table to put the stove on, camp chairs, a tent (we probably won't use it much, but some places we might stop don't let you sleep in your 'car', so we have it as a prop), some tools and a laundry bag.

The giant maw of the Thule carrier.

All of this, from the bed platform and mattress, to the Thule, to the window coverings, to the cooler, to some new gear we bought, cost well under $3000. That's a lot cheaper than a new truck, a new RV, a trailer, or any of the other things we could have put our money in. With any those things, the question is, how often will you use it? The main inconveniences with The Rig will be a lack of "on-site" bathroom, refrigeration, and the larger interior space of a towed vehicle or RV. We don't know how many times we'll travel like this, and if we decide we like the road experience but want more amenities, we can always invest in what would make us more comfortable later. What we do have is a comfortable and convenient ride, with a comfortable place to sleep wherever we are. And it's easy to install and uninstall the platform bed, so most of the time, we'll have a normal 7-seat minivan for use around town. We had it all ready to go a year ago, but COVID go in the way of us taking the long trip until now.