Now, you know what to do when you wish to sleep in your minivan. Who knows, there might be some intruders at midnight. To safeguard you and your family from them, the best thing you should do is not to leave the car windows and doors fully open when you sleep for any reason. Having the windows slightly open can be good but the doors should be locked and nothing fully open.
Ideally you will only open the small windows near the third row for air and leave the others completely closed so there is no chance of anyone using a hanger or something to get in either. Just because they have a lot of blankets some people tend to bury their heads into the blankets considering that it will bring them some extra peace or comfort.
But, when you do this, you often cannot breathe properly. Do not try to sleep across either your back seat or front seat. The best minivans for camping and sleeping at night are offered by different brands. Here is our choice of the best minivans that can meet your requirements.
If you are yet to buy a minivan to meet your camping or cross country needs, you should consider choosing one of those minivans mentioned above. Doing a comparative study is important in selecting the right minivan for your family! Sleeping in your minivan overnight is often the best thing to do after you have been driving for some time rather than risking falling asleep behind the wheel.
Some people will try to just recline their seat and sleep but this rarely works very well. If you are trying to get a few solid hours of sleep you are normally better off laying down the third row and sleeping flat like normal in the back of your minivan. I have been working on cars since I was a kid and I love taking a vehicle that isn't working and bringing it back to life. I have owned quite a few cars over the years and looking for information about different vehicles is still hard online so that is why I started this website.
Click here to read our full disclosure. Good day, beautiful people! These guys travel the country in a minivan camper and have totally mastered the definition of minimalism and proved how awesome and comfortable van life could be. When Daniel and I quit our jobs a few years ago at the beginning of , we knew we wanted to spend at least a couple years traveling the world, including taking a long road trip around North America.
We evaluated the whole spectrum of vehicle options — everything from throwing a tent in the back of a sedan to buying a big RV or trailer. Much to the amusement of our friends and family, we ultimately decided on a minivan camper. Many people ask us this all the time. In order to sleep well in a minivan, we needed to undergo what we call camper conversion.
We made a few light modifications to our minivan — taking out the seats leaving only the front seats, throwing an air mattress topped with memory foam in the back, and building some extra storage — then we hit the road in our new and improved camper van.
I had been doing regular work travel for years, and we had both taken shorter road trips, but neither of us had ever spent more than a few weeks at a time away from home. With no full-time travel experience under our belts, I was hesitant to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a big RV or trailer. The minivan camper addressed that concern. As of March , we have over , miles on our little minivan camper van! Keeping this website current and informative takes a lot of work.
If you find our content valuable please consider supporting us. Thank you! Everything we might need to hit the road or the sea or the air is listed in our free travel packing checklist. We pick and choose from the checklist depending on the adventure ahead.
To get access to our free, editable packing list please subscribe to our website. If you enjoy the checklist, please share a link to this page on social media as thanks. Please like our FaceBook page and follow us on Instagram. The best thing about this minivan camper conversion is that we have made no modifications to the minivan. We just remove the middle row of seats and, depending on the setup, either remove the backseat or stow it down flat. We can convert everything back by simply removing the bed and putting the seats back in.
Depending on what we are heading out to do we have different types of beds and gear. We added carriers for our bikes and a cargo box for fishing and ski gear. If we need to carry a lot of gear, as we did on our six-months trip up to Alaska , we store six Action Packers below a sheet of plywood. Note that we went up there for work and did not camp the entire six months. We spent several weeks on the way north and on the way south camping out of the minivan as well as a few shorter trips while up there.
The minivan fits exactly one standard sheet of plywood 4 x 8 feet or 48 x 96 inches though we trimmed it by about two feet to gain space between the bed and the front seats. Make sure the plywood is not treated — that awful smell never goes away. Using this air mattress is more comfortable than the foam and is also not as tall, so you gain some headroom. Topped with some memory foam it does a great job of keeping out the cold that an air mattress attracts.
More importantly, the whole bed can be rolled up and moved aside to make space for other things during the day. Just make sure to deflate it slightly when you go over mountain passes or it will pop! The photo below shows us using foam padding but after a few nights, we thought it was a bit too hard and took up too much space.
Now we use this air mattress topped with this 1. In front of the six Action Packers are three clear tubs. We each have one tub allotted to our clothes if we stay at hotels this space is taken up by our favorite suitcases.
The middle tub holds our backpacks which contain our electronics like tablets, cameras, and laptops. In front of the clear tubs are the chairs and the cooler and other kitchen boxes. We also each get a gear hammock which are great for the stuff we use all the time like jackets, hats, gloves, and Kindles.
They are a bit fragile so when we need to replace them we will go with these ones that are a parachute-type material. Mike built a platform for our bed and we use these shallow tubs like drawers under the frame.
With the back seats removed we are even able to fit our inflatable kayak and inflatable SUP under the bed! Once the platform is in place and the front seats are pushed all the way forward, there is a good amount of space in front of the bed.
I recently even found a tub that fits under the center console to hold our shoes. We drove the minivan to Alaska and back with some of it traveled on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. Watch our video about traveling on the Alaska ferry here. We lost several hubcaps and had a thick layer of mud and dead bugs. If we are just heading out for the weekend we use the air-mattress and memory foam after lowering the back seats. With the taller air mattress, you also lose some headroom when sitting up in bed.
The photo below shows a cheap air mattress. Notice the bump on the left? With two people laying down that bump starts to grow in the middle and you end up wedged on the outside! Ask me how I know that! We traveled the entire state of Florida , for over a month, with most of our time spent in the Florida Keys. The campgrounds can get quite crowded, but even without reservations we always lucked out with either a last-minute booking or just showing up.
For this trip, we had the platform bed with the high-quality air mattress. This gave us lots of storage under the bed. We even had the inflatable kayak under there.
On windless nights, Florida can be pretty buggy. We ended up buying a window screen repair kit and using the black spline to shove into the window track.
The bottom was secured with a magnetic strip. It worked fine as a temporary solution but we had to remove it every day since we could not roll up the windows with it in place. If you have a better solution please let me know in the comments! While cruising the Inside Passage of British Columbia on our boat we wanted to explore the west coast of Vancouver Island.
Using our favorite air mattress and mattress topper we were able to make a pretty comfortable bed after folding down all the seats. We each have a Sea to Summit toiletry bag and these awesome squeeze bottles for shampoo, soap, lotion, etc. The bottles are below the carry-on size limit and just enough for about 2 weeks of use for me.
They are easy to fill and clean and have never leaked. They also stand up with the nozzle down so they are always ready to use. They are easy to toss in a bag with a towel and head to the campground showers. Check out more of our favorite gear here! We love these folding chairs. They take up a bit more space than those folding chairs that fold into a tube-shape, but they are so much more comfortable!
0コメント