How we decided a truck + trailer is best for us
Discovering vanlife
My husband and I stumbled on van life while trying to avoid flying during the pandemic. We rented a Mercedes Sprinter and were shocked at how much we enjoyed it — especially my husband who is a nester and generally likes to stay in one place when traveling. Traveling via van let us ‘nest’ safely during the pandemic, and we loved the coziness of tiny home living.
We also discovered boondocking, and were astounded at the beauty and freedom of camping in deserts and mountains.
Let’s get a van!
Renting a van for two weeks cost almost $10k total after all the fees and insurance. We didn’t love paying that much for a rental, but we considered it as the only safe alternative to flying to my brother’s wedding during the pandemic. Looking back, it would have been more economical to just buy a van even if we sold it later, but we also didn’t know anything about vanlife or even imagined we would want to have that lifestyle.
After deciding to invest in our own van, we spent many months researching vans — makes, models, conversions, etc. We almost bought a used and fully outfitted Ford Transit, but that fell through because of title issues.
Our wish list:
- Reasonably outfitted (electrical, insulation, water), since our history of DIY is not great
- no more than $40–60k, basically how much we were planning to spend to replace our one vehicle
- 4x4 or AWD for offroading
- Preferably diesel if higher mileage
- Midroof
But van prices continued to skyrocket in 2022, with base cargo vans basically unavailable to order and used cargo vans often marked up uncomfortably high for how much mileage they had. Some fully decked out vans were going for as much as small houses in Michigan.
And then we learned our new HOA in Arizona was the somewhat inflexible kind, where having a campervan on our driveway wouldn’t be allowed. And then our one and only car broke down.
Let’s get a truck and a trailer (not a van)
So with all that, we decided to go with a new 4x4 truck plus trailer rather than a camper van because:
- Brand new truck meant we wouldn’t have to worry about repairs for a few years
- Only Mercedes sprinters have true Four wheel drives and they were out of our price range, plus repairing Mercedes was going to be more expensive and take longer to find parts and mechanics than it would for repairing fords
- With 4x4 truck and a trailer outfitted for off-roading, we could go boondocking with peace of mind knowing we have done our best to avoid getting stuck
- We could get a trailer that would fit in our garage and allow us to abide by HOA rules
- For our budget, we could finance a brand new truck and trailer, rather than getting a used campervan that already had miles on it
Time to choose a trailer
On to more research investigating the right trailer for us! Read how we chose the Aliner
