Quick Update - I just recently sold the van. That was a tough decision! After driving that far in the van, I had gotten kind of attached to it. But since moving to Seattle, and realizing that parking was going to cost me $85 a month, I decided to let it go.
Let's see, I bought the van used in 2003, it is a 1993 Chevy Astro van. It's one of those cargo type vans, there are no windows in the back, at all. It came with a roof rack, and had tool boxes and shelvs in the back. It's also got one of those dividers that seperate the back area from the front, which I really like, because no one can see into the back to see what is there! I removed the tool boxes and the shelves and sold them, as I found they took up lots of room, but none of my gear fit into them!
One of the cool things I had built into the van a couple of years ago was a power system. I have a 1000 watt inverter, which converts 12 volts DC into 110 volts AC. I can run computers, TVs, my microwave, as well as charging all my camera batteries while driving down the road. I also installed a deep cycle marine type battery, with an solenoid to isolate the second battery and inverter from the main starting battery. This way, I can run dead, and still start the van. I set the solenoid to energize when the key was turned on, so when I'm driving, both batteries charge, automatically. When the key is off, they are isolated. If you are interested in doing something like this, email me and I'll try to describe it better! But one bit I'll give you, don't buy a "battery isolator", they are appearently not very good. The solenoid is better, it is very efficient, from what I have been told.
Another power related modification I made, when I was putting in the second battery, was to install some 12 volt recepticals for accessories. One thing I have been using these for is to power my laptop. I had a choice to run the laptop off of the inverter, but since I also have a 12 volt adapter for the laptop, I thought it would be easier to just run it from the big battery directly. Then I'd turn on the inverter for other things. I also have a 12 volt cooler that I can run direct from the battery. Again, because it doesn't run off of the starter battery, there is no problem with dead battery when its time to start the van. Very cool!
A couple of years ago I installed a RV type roof vent in the back of the van, and a sun roof in the front. This helps a lot, because I don't have air conditioning in the van. The vent in the back has a vent cover installed, so I can leave the vent open while driving. I'll be sure to get a picture of that, because the RV vent by itself will bend or break quickly if you drive with one open. Ask anyone who has a trailer or motorhome, they'll tell you. Most people have broken at least one in the first year! As an added bonus, the vent cover wont let rain in, so you don't have to close the vent, and it has a vent fan in it!
Something that had to be fixed before leaving on this trip was a bad transmission noise. Luckily, my brother the mechanic knew some guys at the transmission shop that were willing to work on it after hours. So instead of it taking a couple of days and around $600, it got done over night and for about $300 or so. And it worked great!
Once the transmission was fixed, I had to figure out how to get my whole production studio to fit in the van, and still leave enough room to sleep. Let me tell you, that wasn't pretty! What I came up with worked out pretty well, eventually!
First I needed a bed. The apartment I lived in at the time had an area that people would leave things they didn't need. Things like a couch would just show up, and a day later it would just be gone. Well, this one day, a week before I left to shoot the documentary, I see half a bunk bed frame in the hall. I actually grabbed it just for the wood, thought I'd build some shelves or something. Well, when it came to build the bed in the van, I started looking at the bunk bed, and decided that if I did some cutting, it might work out. The back of the van is about 6 feet, from the back door to the divider. I'm 5'11 tall, so that doesn't leave much room! Then I decided that I'd rather have some room under the bed for storage, and sleep up closer to the ceiling. It was either that, or sleep on the floor, and put the storage over my head. I had some storage bins I planned to store the supplies in, so I built the bed frame so the bins would fit under with out wasting much space.
With the bed built, it was time to build a work area. Since I'm writing this webpage after getting back, I can say I never really got this part to work as I had planned it! Here is how it was supposed to be. I had the bed running from front to back, on the drivers side. On the passenger side, I have the side sliding door. What I had planned to do is have a seat at the sliding door, facing backwards. I was going to mount my two 17 inch monitors on a shelf I had built, up as high as they would go. This would leave enough room under the monitors to store gear when I was driving, or for me to put my legs when I was working on video, etc. The problem was that the monitors were very heavy, and I couldn't build anything strong enough to mount them, that I felt would have been strong enough to securely hold them while driving. I could just imagine them flying forward when I hit the brakes! So while driving, I had the monitors on the floor, packed between boxes or the duffle bags I had my clothes in. When I stopped, like when I got to where I was going, I was going to set the computers up, but I found that I just never was parked one place long enough to make it worth setting everything up in the van.
Aside from never actually setting up the computers, I did manage to get everything to work out pretty well. The first few nights of sleeping in the van were very rough, as I kept getting claustrophobia. Eventually I got things moved around enough to where I could move a little. The problem was that I had so much gear back there, that it was difficult to get the door open or closed, and I had trouble reaching the door handle. One day I actually practiced getting into bed, then back out again, until I felt comfortable doing it. Did I mention there was no windows in the back?
One thing of note, I took my small microwave with me, and it worked great running on the Inverter. Its a pretty small one, doesn't pull much power, so that worked out well. I set it on the floor in the back, right next to the side door, so when I stopped for lunch, I could just open the door, put in a frozen burrito, turn on the inverter, and 2 minutes later, I had lunch. Life is good when things work!
Lets see... I'm going to cover some of the "tech toys" more in the Equipment page, so I'll just hit on some of it here quickly. I had the laptop in the front while I was driving. Hooked to the laptop was GPS navigation receiver. This was great! What I did was put the antenna in the back of the van, in the roof vent. The vent is plastic, so it didn't block the signal, it stayed out of the rain, and I basically forgot about it. Once the software was up and running, I had an instant "fix" on my location, down to a few feet, and when I was moving, my location updated constantly on a moving map. If I typed in an address I was looking for, the map had a line drawn on it from where I was to where I was going. As long as my location was on that line, I knew I was good to go. If I missed a turn, I could see it right away, so I'd just make a turn and find the line again. The system I was using didn't have any voice inputs or feedback on it like some cars have, but I found it to work very well.
I already mentioned the 12 volt cooler, if you've not seen one of these, its just a cooler that would hold 10 or 12 coke cans, but instead of needing ice every day, you just plug it into your car. The only drawback to this is they are kind of noisy, and it gives off heat, sort of like your fridge. It didn't get cold enough to freeze anything, but when I put a digital thermometer in it, I had it down to about 43 degrees, and it was 85 outside. So thats good enough to keep milk a few days. The cooler is actually big enough to put a gallon of milk in, but I didn't want to take a gallon with me.
While driving, I usually had a video camera aimed out the windshield. Some of that video is on the DVD, if you're curious, you'll have to look for that when I get the DVD released. I thought that since I was going to be driving for 5 days each way, and I might never get to some of these states again, I could shoot some video. On the trip home, I shot the video directly to my laptop, as timelapse. So instead of recording contineously, it recorded every 5th frame of video, and skipped the rest. Video is 30 frames per second, so I was recording 1, skipping 5, recording the next one, etc. So when it was played, it looked like I was going about 300 mph or so! Even so, I still had about 8 hours of video for the drive home! On the DVD, I edited that 8 hours down to about 7 minutes, sort of the highlights of the trip home. Kind of fun to watch, I still go back and watch that sometimes!
If you have any questions about any of this, drop me a line! Just go to the Contact Me link at the top of this page, and send me an email. Thanks for reading!