Avion Ultra: The Return Trip (Day 2)
In Day 2 of our return trip from picking up our new (to us) 1970 Avion C11 has us stopping by Silver Springs State Park and wandering into Georgia.
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Avion Ultra: The Return Trip (Day 1)
There is something so relieving in closing a question. Whatever the solution may be, to just take any options off the table and proceed down that single, prescripted path is liberating. We spent years considering camper options. A cheap new camper? A custom pop up? A rugged specialty off-road rig? There were so many options that we wasted hours upon hours discussing and stepping through what it would take for each to serve our needs. In the end, we wanted an adventure and, when the opportunity arose, we took it—partially out of a love for the design, and partially in a desperate need to stop looking and start doing.
Avion Ultra: Arrival
We walk around the outside of the camper. We prod about on the inside. We look at each other and nod. It needs work, but we expect that. It smells like what it is: a 47-year-old camper. But the aluminum exterior looks solid and the interior will do...for now.
Avion Ultra: Preparing For The Journey
Before we can turn toward Florida, we have to dump the fiberglass shell that had formed the roof of our home this past year. To our thinking, fiberglass is designed to be light. So this will be awkward but rather simple to remove. Right?
Avion Ultra: An Opportunity
Early on in our travels, we agree that we want a truck camper. We are not set on any one particular type. There are so many to choose from and each camper is a matter of compromise. We like the idea of renovating a classic—something with a style unique to its time. There are several models we are eying on Craigslist when a 1970 Avion Ultra pops up in Florida.
Adventurer Truck Campers
Today we finally got around to viewing some truck campers. We had been researching different campers for quite a while but there are limited vendors that actually stock and sell truck bed campers. If you go to a Camping World there will mostly be RVs, 5-wheels, and trailers. Maybe fewer people want truck bed campers because they are smaller, but it's that size that allows a nimbleness in travel that no other camper provides.
The Long Haul
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
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.
DIY Truck Bed Camper
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.
Dodgy II: The Truckening
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.