Richard’s Van

How would you like to be able to stand up straight in your van camper?

I often spot interesting little rigs while I’m biking around campsites. Then I get distracted by some ongoing situation and either I or they have to leave before I can get to them. This one was a squeaker, with my returning, camera and voice recorder in hand, one day before Richard’s departure.

Big door, and that step in is deep, making for a secure step that requires no dancing around. It technically robs floor space, but does so in an area that it would rarely be needed.

What got my attention was his van’s tall roof, and the fact that it was not attached to a Sprinter van. Sprinters have become commonplace as the basis for conversion campers because of their high roof option, relatively high fuel mileage, and their prodigious towing and weight-carrying capabilities. Offered by Mercedes and Freightliner, the Sprinter’s former link with Dodge has apparently been severed when Chrysler’s Mercedes overlord changed to Fiat, which now offers Fiat’s version as the Ram ProMaster Cargo Van. Whether good or bad, the ProMaster is not even a distant cousin to the Sprinter.

That IS a large door! Richard mentioned a balky catch that seems to pervade this model, but it works, and notice the RV-style window he added.

Richard identified his van as a Nissan NV2500, one of several variations that Nissan has offered for awhile to tradesmen and other commercial users. I find that interesting because Nissan once had plans to go head-to-head with

Van or RV?

When this represents “very cloudy”, you know you’re going to like it here. What will you reside in while you’re here?

When a few hardy souls, by circumstance or free choice, decide that a mobile lifestyle is the way to go for them, the choice of what type of contraption they will live in can seem like a difficult puzzle to put together. That’s only because it is. The options are wide, and small differences can make or break a choice.

What to choose, oh what to choose?

I’ll claim right here that I’m not going to deliberately try to steer you toward the one solution that I prefer myself, though my feature preferences will leak into this post, of course. It helps that I’m not living in the type of rig I actually prefer, but what I do have does work quite well for me. I think you’ll know when to filter out what doesn’t apply to you, and so know whenever a particular type of rig may not be such great shakes for you, because you’re not me. Thank your lucky stars for that! Personally, I consider a converted van to be just another form of RV, but for the sake of this article, I’m pretending it’s not.

The major caveat is that I’m going to babble on here about full-timing only, and having no other housing available in the foreseeable future. Anyone can make do in anything when you have friends or relatives to stay at now and then, or some other form of