For as long as I can remember, I have always loved traveling and wished I did more of it. I feel like there is so much of the world I haven’t explored yet. I have been to Canada, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, and a year ago I went back to Vietnam for the first time since I left when I was a baby. It was our family’s first international trip and our kids were hooked. They both loved Vietnam so much and we had big plans for 2020 to do more exploring of places we haven’t visited in the world.
A few months later, the Pandemic hit. We were in shelter in place and our way of staying sane was to do lots of weekend excursions and to be out in nature. Out of fear of using public bathrooms, we also rented a couple RV so that we would have our own personal space and feel saver traveling in California.
I really wanted an RV or a trailer or honestly anything that was a house on wheel so when we went camping, we could be more comfortable and warm. I love being in nature, but I truly hated being cold.
I honestly started researching trailers because I thought it was going to be the more affordable way for me to convince my money conscious husband. However, he is not a fan of hitching a trailer to our SUV and it makes him nervous that it could potentially unhitch.
I never even considered a van conversion because I thought it was completely out of our price budget. Little did I know that Anthony does entertain some of my ideas no matter how crazy they are. He was reading in a van forum about how people use their vans for everyday driving. We were in the market for a new family car this year and thought about buying a 2020 Honda Odyssey. Since it wasn’t a huge price difference we seriously started exploring the idea of buying a used van and doing a conversion ourselves.
Anthony really likes that this will be my everyday vehicle and we won’t just have an extra vehicle sitting around collecting dust. He likes the idea that the 148 wheelbase fits in a standard parking spot so it makes it a lot easier for us to travel and park anywhere. We found videos of families of 4-6 were making it work for them.
Honest I’m still shocked, but I vividly remember how shocked I was when I was using his cell phone for directions and saw a text on his phone that said something along the line of, “yes, the Sprinter van is still available.” I turned the phone over for him to see it and looked wide-eyed and asked what the text was about. He told me he started looking, but didn’t want to get my hopes up until he found something within our budget. Our budget was under $35K.
In the beginning we were looking at both Sprinter and Transit vans. We both really wanted the bell and whistle of the Mercedes Sprinter, but what sealed the deal for us to go with the Transit was being able to find a mechanic if we happen to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. It’s also so much more expensive for Mercedes parts versus Ford parts.
We narrowed it down to a 148 wheelbase high roof Transit cargo van. We were going to do a van conversion to seat and sleep 5. It would be the four of us and my mother in law who have been traveling with us the whole pandemic.
On our 16th wedding anniversary on January 30th, we test drove our first Transit and Promaster van. We really love the Transit van, but at $39K, it was completely out of our price range.
We started checking CarGurus everyday for cargo vans. It was really tough finding something under our price budget with under 50K miles that we wanted. We found a couple in Southern California and one in Oregon. We had a couple of weekends where we almost drove out to purchase the vans, but it didn’t work out. We also had a great potential van with the Elk Grove Ford Dealership, but decided we wanted lower mileage and changed our search for under 30K miles.
The market cooled down for a while and it was really difficult finding any high roof Transit van. We decided to expand our search outside of California and started to find some great deals on passenger Transit vans in Texas, New York, Indiana and other eastern states. We were really close to getting our van in Texas and even paid for Lemon Squad to come out to do an inspection. During the inspection we found a big dent in the roof where we wanted to install our hydraulic bed so we were nervous it was going to compromise the integrity of the frame.
I became really discouraged so Anthony did most of the searching after that. He found a few, but dealerships weren’t taking us seriously. Finally, we found our baby in Indiana!
Outdoor Phamily Adventures 