Dodgy II is a 2015 dual cab, long bed 3500 Dodge Ram Truck with 4-wheel drive. That means we can off road during the day and have plenty for room stretch out at night. It also means that parallel parking is a nightmare that we will never wake up from.
Currently, we live in the bed of the truck, with a A.R.E wedge truck bed shell for cover and a home-made bed with storage underneath. What we don’t have: running water, a heater, a cooler, or a toilet. Guess which of these we miss the most?
Overland rigs are never “done.” There is always some new upgrade in the hopper. And while we have mostly been focusing on renovating our 1970 Avion C11 truck camper, that’s not to say we’ve been ignoring our truck. Along with…
We have always had greater ambitions for Dodgy than just a bed under a truck shell. You don't need a 3500 Dodge Ram truck to go camping in the redwoods. It's impressive. Maybe it might make some guys with the chromed out 1500s feel a little inadequate but that is their business, not ours.
Packing the truck cab is still a work in progress. We are packed and ready to go, but how things are packed will be subject to change over the trip. After a year of frustration whenever we took a tight corner and a loose plastic set of drawers would fall over and spew its contents across the van floor, we have a better, though imperfect solution.
Rolling back the months to when we first moved out of our San Francisco apartment and into Dodgy, we had ambitions, very custom ambitions. We intended to strip Dodgy and turn it into a travel home tailored to our needs. While Dodgy was amazing, with more space than we could have hoped for, we quickly discovered that finding replacement parts and people who would work on Dodgy was an onerous task. So we shifted gears: instead of making Dodgy the end-all-be-all road chalet, Dodgy would be our prototype.
As has been alluded to earlier, dear Dodgy has not been at top form. Aside from her preexisting maladies—broken air conditioning, speedometer, temperamental gas gauge, and such—the passenger side window had stopped working. Of course, there is little that duck tape can't "fix," but we didn't want the window fixed in place. Rolling down the window was the only was we could manage the heat. With summer around the corner, we needed a more permanent solution.