Today’s Ramble: Making your truck camper what you want it

I don’t mind cruising around town with my truck camper. Some people ask me… why use it as a daily driver? It’s big, bulky, and a gas guzzler. Technically it’s not my daily — I have a little beater car to zip around town in. My trusty ole 2004 Toyota Matrix. But I do use the truck camper quite often, as you might have read — not just for camping.

This is yet another post about how I try to utilize this camper as often as I can — even if it’s just for an hour a day. The 1st Gen Tundra isn’t actually all that bulky, and the OVRLND Camper I have on it is relatively lightweight for a truck camper. Checking in around 300lbs, the truck hardly feels it and I only lost about 1mpg after it was installed and loaded up with gear. When you’re getting 15mpg average, dropping to 14mpg doesn’t cause much stress for me.

Today I picked up my 8-year old daughter from school and seeing her eyes light up when I rolled up with the camper was totally worth it. She knew that we had some time to kill in the camper because my son had another hour to go before his school let out. We hopped into the back of the truck, fired up the TV (a computer monitor with a Google Chromecast plugged in), and had some snacks. Knocked out a few episodes of Henry Danger and before we knew it the hour had gone by. My truck camper is powered by the Anker Solix C1000 Power Station, which handles all my electricity needs.

One of the things I love about the OVRLND Camper is the space in the lower level. Because it sits on the truck bed rails and it’s not a slide-in camper, the inside is totally empty and you make it what you want. I purposely had them manufacture mine with a taller ceiling — not only to store more bedding when collapsed — but to have a taller hangout space in the “lower level” when the camper is collapsed. My daughter can fully stand up in there. And while I cannot, it’s no biggy I have to duck just a little to get around. I can set up a regular sized camping chair and sit up fully with plenty of headroom.

In a regular slide-in camper you have furniture on either side of the camper and a small walkway. I didn’t want that. I wanted to arrange the layout to conform to my lifestyle. Plenty of times we’re hanging out in there for short periods of time and have ZERO need to pop this up. So in essence, it’s like we have a camper van. Park, climb in, chill out. No setup needed. After all, I wouldn’t want to pop this camper up in the school parking lot and draw even more attention to myself. Now… if it was a hangout time of more than a few hours… then I’d find a spot tucked away and pop it all up.

I can’t stress enough how awesome it is that the folks over at OVRLND Campers lets you make so much customization to your build. It’s what sets them apart from the Four Wheel Campers Project M, Topo Toppers, GFC, Lone Peak, etc. I actually wrote a whole article about their “Secret Menu” of customizations that you can have them do for you.

Enough rambling. Happy Camping everyone!