Prepping the Van

Before we bought the van, we spent lots of time looking at DIY mods of the van, nice little upfits.  Oh, the amazing things people have done with their Sprinters.  We have dreams of what we could do to the Sprinter, but I think we're keeping it pretty small on this round.  Instead of custom chairs and pull out or up desk tops, we'll stick with modding the back to hold all our dressers and keep us organized.

We're going with the Sterilite three drawer dressers.  I have had one for years and years, purchased when I was teaching Sunday school and needed transportable storage.  The wheels came in handy back then, but for now, I want everything to NOT move, so we removed all my wheels and then never put the wheels on any of the other ones.  Fitting seven of these bad boys means stacking some, so Bill's building shelves for the back.  The awesome part of that is that we'll have room for the coolers under the dressers on the side.  Yeah!  Our old coolers had served us well, but required additional weight on top to keep closed, so we bought new ones since we'll be relying on them for many months.  We went with Coleman marine coolers.  Five days of ice.  We'll be testing that out.

We also invested in a Thule bike rack.  REI was having their anniversary sale, so we hit them up for shoes and a bike rack.  We've been looking at them for a couple months now, so it's a relief to have it checked off our list.  In my searching for places to go and things to do, I found Hiawatha Trail up in ID.  It looks really awesome, and the boys have some longer bike trips for their bicycling merit badge, so it's a perfect match.  We had only planned on taking three bikes, but Bill will need to go with the boys on Hiawatha, so we'll also end up taking a bike for  Bill.  Good thing we bought the four bike rack!  Talking to my parents about needing another bike, it turns out my dad is done with his bike, so we'll be taking his! The other mod we'll be taking on in the next week or so is installing a DVD player.  We won't be putting in screens, though--the van doesn't have a CD player.  It's got bluetooth, USB, auxillary, but no CD.  We could have gone with a portable disc player, but I worried about skipping and such.  I wanted something installed and stable, so this is the solution Bill found.  I'm very excited to get it installed finally.  So many people advocated us transferring our CDs to a USB drive, but I have a ton.  And I don't want to spend my time transferring formats.  Not to mention my technology woes, which would cause me much more frustration than I have room for in my life right now.  Now we'll be able to get back to listening to Story of the World. That's what we have planned for right now.  One of our goals at this point is to sell the tiny trailer before the big trip.  We'd like to fit everything into the van, safely and securely.  We should have the room, if we're smart about it all.  I'll let you know how it goes!