“Hey, I think my friend has a van that he wants to sell.”

    I had put it out there, and the universe answered an hour later.  Travis made a phone call and a few minutes later, we went over to Levi’s to check out the van.

    I asked the first logical question.  “Tell me again why it’s been sitting for a year and a half?”

    “Well, my wife didn’t like it, we were kinda trying to sell it, but not really…I could get more for it, if it weren’t for the hail damage…”  The strange, vague answers that made no sense made no difference to me.  I liked her from the get-go, this 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan SE – 7-passenger, dual-sliding door soccer mom van.  A spiraling crack that took up about 1/8 of the bottom passenger side of the windshield.  He casually mentioned that his wife had been “tough on the brakes,” which I should have taken a bit more seriously.

    I had Mechanic Mike pick her up and give her a good once-over.  He suggested replacing a few things but said, for the most part, she was good to go.  In retrospect, while this may have been a passable inspection for operation of the vehicle in the United States, it would turn out to be insufficient in regard to where the van was headed.  We underestimated the difficult terrain and road conditions ahead and overestimated the ease of finding both quality parts and labor along those same roads.

    Levi and I settled on a price: $2000.  He may or may not have asked me to write “$200” on the Bill of Sale “for tax reasons.”  But for the record, I cannot exactly recall.

    I cleaned her up, shot some photographs, and took out the measuring tape.  Boy, did I have some plans for her…

    First, I measured for the platform – mattress above, storage below.  The upward slope of the floor from front to back was problematic, but once I laid the dimensions out, I was fine.  I settled on a 6” memory foam mattress and rather arbitrarily decided on 23” of headroom, which seemed far more than most van setups I had seen.  I had a Thule box to go on the roof, so I went for more room and comfort inside, knowing storage wasn’t an issue.  I sunk all five back seats into the floor and set out.  (Had I to do it again, I might consider a hinged design that allowed for the usage of at least the two seats directly behind the driver.  This would provide more seating options for the driver, as well as allow for possibly picking up hitchhikers in order to defray costs and provide some company along the way.  I mean, what could go wrong?)

    Once the headroom was decided, I researched storage containers whose width would fit under the footprint of the bed.  As soon as they arrived, it was off to spend some time with Philadelphia Jim, who built the platform as sturdy as a cement bunker, complete with 3/4” plywood glued and screwed to a 2x4 frame on 2x8 joists.

    When I got the van back from Jim, the next thing was the curtains, which my mother, my aunt, and I went to insane lengths to design and fabricate.  In an uninsulated garage during a Montana November, Aunt Gretchen and I spent hours taping up newspaper, tracing the contours of the windows, generating patterns for my mother, who would cut and serge the blackout fabric, complete with buttonholes, through which the suction cup hooks would pass, thereby suspending the curtains.  In theory.  Sadly, the most I would ever be able to manage was two windows – 12-14 hooks, maybe.  That was once, and the curtains didn’t stay up for long.  It turns out temperature, humidity and ever-so-slightly curved glass join forces to be a formidable opponent.  This painstaking design and production was replaced on my last stop in the U.S. after watching a do-it-yourself video online.  Tawnie and I measured the length of the side windows and cut blackout fabric a bit longer than that length, then we simply suspended these curtains with binder clips (my secret weapon on the trip) tucked in to where the plastic covers met the fabric ceiling of the van.  The end.  Actually, I did use one of the Montana curtains in the back window, so all was not lost.  Ah, good times…

    The van was equipped with a Kenwood KDC-X300 receiver, a power amplifier, (2) 6x9 and (2) 5 ¼ Kenwood speakers.  Because life is too short – and roadtrips too long – for lame sound.

    My brother James and I installed window rain guards, switched out the tailgate lift support struts, and practiced tarp canopy setups in his garage in Salt Lake City.  A former rock climber, kayaker, camper and current salt and freshwater fish whisperer, this sojourn was right up his alley, or at least an alley he used to know - before a wife, three girls, a career, etc.  (He would retire less than two years after I returned from my roadtrip, at the ripe old age of 53.  Not bad.  Plenty of time, juice, and cash to return to some of those alleys.)

    The final family member to put their stamp on the van was my father in Las Vegas.  Predictably, with a lifetime of architecture, contracting, and building behind him, our focus was solely on the bed/storage platform.  I think he was rather impressed with my design and definitely with Jim’s craftsmanship, but we would still pull the entire structure out, make no less than five trips back and forth to Home Depot, and sand, treat, and seal that wooden behemoth to within an inch of its life that had just begun.

    It meant everything to have such supportive, caring, capable, personally connected hands on La Bestia Verde (The Green Beast), especially the touches of my family.  Their fingerprints were all over her, and we would carry them with us southward.