Camping across the US with 3 kids

The summer of 2016 I somehow convinced my beautiful wife how fun it would be to try and tent camp across the US to see relatives on her side of the family in Oregon and Washington State. We reside in Georgia.

I just had a hard time stomaching the cost of buying 4 plane tickets (Babies fly free), renting a car and getting a hotel for 2 weeks. My desk job has it's perks, but this caged up cube animal needed some adventure! It took some persuading but as soon as I got the go ahead I started the work of outfitting my truck to accommodate three kids (7,4, and 1) with my wife driving, while I worked. I own a 1997 Toyota T100 extended cab with a truck topper.

Three Island Crossing State Park - Glenns Ferry, Idaho

The only place that can fit a rear facing car seat for an infant is the front passenger seat. I had no idea when I bought this truck in 2001 that I would still be driving it with a wife and 3 children. I just knew when I was buying it that I wanted something I could build out for camping. 
   I needed to work 20 hours a week as we traveled in order to take off enough time, and was having a hard time imagining getting any work done inside the cab with 3 young children. We also own an 8 seater Toyota Sequoia full size SUV, but I needed some kind of partition. Earbuds weren't going to cut it when I needed to be on the phone with my clients or to brainstorm through some difficult software development issues. I started researching how to install a seat in the bed of my pickup truck. The thought that came to mind was the old Subaru Brat.

A couple of Google searches later and I come across the Bedryder truck bed seating system. The first thing I noticed with the Bedryder was the price. I was hoping to stay frugal with this new idea and it was costly on a truck that was pretty old. I kept doing some searches and asking around, but I eventually came back to this seating system because I knew I couldn't build something as easy to remove as the Bedryder. I needed to be able to remove the seat since I had plans to put a queen air mattress in the pickup bed for camping (that didn't exactly work out as planned). I was able to get the price reduced a little by just ordering one seat, but now I wish I had the second seat since my 8 year old son is running out of room in the back seat, and we now have our fourth child. I watched the YouTube install video, and it looked easy enough to do myself. It actually turned into a weekend project, and wasn't quite as easy as I thought. Might be worth paying a little extra for the install if you have an interest in one of these. I was able to meet the owner, Carry Hyde, in person to pick up the seat. He was super friendly, and when I told him I was going to use it as a mobile office for a camping trip out west he told me that was a first for him as far as uses for the seat.  

TBO- Truck Bed Office

As one can imagine, sitting in the bed of a pickup truck in the summer is brutal. I knew this from driving my wife's jeep wrangler in the summer time. The heat from the black asphalt will roast you, especially sitting in a traffic jam. I tried a few things like sealing the window between the topper and running a small fan to push the AC out from the cab of the truck. Those helped, but it was still too hot back there. Luckily I didn't have to deal with this too much since we spent most of our time out west in the low humidity. Opening the windows on the truck topper was perfect out west. I do have a few other solutions that have helped with the AC problem back there but will save those for a later post. One thing that surprised me about this seat was how comfortable it was. I normally don't sleep much in a car, but I was able to take a pretty long power nap in this seat. You can stretch your legs out and slide forward in the harness so it holds you well. My wife had no idea how easy it was to sleep in the seat. She just saw me sweating in the beginning of our trip through the midwest, and thought it was the last place she wanted to be.

I was surprisingly productive in the back of the truck. I loved glancing out the windows at all the scenery as I thought through some coding problems. I did have to ask my wife to slow down a little bit at times since the bouncing around made it hard to move the mouse. One thing I did miss was having a second monitor. Perhaps figuring out a power solution with solar can allow that in the future.  Amy and I are currently looking into more expensive options like a slide in truck camper that would make things a little easier on our next adventure. We are holding off on ordering one from Capri camper until after we get back from the Overland Expo in Asheville, NC.