The last mention of this decision we put on this website was something about trying to pick an RV for ourselves to travel around in, and then plop down someplace to build a boat in a few months…or possibly longer. We were ruminating on that and having trouble making the choice. One day driving back from yet another trip looking at the RVs which wasn’t particularly productive, I said something like “If we didn’t have to accommodate our cat on this journey, how would we do it”? We started talking, and decided that we weren’t really RV people and would probably just camp with a car and a tent, like we did on our first Interlude. Or maybe we would get a big old van and camp in it, rather than the tent. For this sort of travels, we did fine in Peepcar for ourselves ten years ago, but we would need a big truck or cargo van later for boat-building, so why not get a big vehicle now?

But the RVs just seemed too big to drive around. We were arguing about whether it would be worse to have a truck w/ a trailer (overall length of 35-40 feet, impossible to park anyplace but a campground or truck stop), or just to have a 22 foot self-propelled RV that would almost fit into a parking space, but would mean not having transportation unless we were willing to move our house…at 7-9mpg. Regardless, it just didn’t make sense to spend $8000 for an old RV just for the cat. We decided that we would somehow find a way to make a smaller vehicle work, and our travels might have to be planned around the cat, but at least they wouldn’t be planned around the vehicle.

In trying to figure out the RV stuff, we had read Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon (ok, we had to return it to the library before finishing it, but we will get back to it someday).. Both these guys traveled in modest vehicles, but both of them were single guys. One was a small camper made on a pickup chassis, and the other was a Ford cargo van with a bunk built into the back. So we started thinking about cargo vans.

After looking at cargo vans, we figured out two things: One, they never seem to have cruise control, which Meps dearly wanted in our next vehicle, and, Two, they are just plain raw inside, and would need a lot of work to make them look anything like civilized enough to spend a couple months driving to Seattle the long way in.

So next we started looking at old Conversion Vans. These are the opposite extreme, with lots of fancy upholstery, real wood trim, and a TV and VCR installed. As most of you know, we detest TV on general principles, so that wasn’t a big plus, but these vans were pretty cheap, and were generally pretty low mileage, so we looked at quite a few of them. Plus a lot of them have a high ceiling, so when we built a bunk in, there would be more headroom or underneath storage available. And they came with windows that open, and already have screens and curtains. But most of them were a bit tired, and several of them behaved quite badly on test drives….so we lost our enchantment with them.