In a recent posting I described my trip to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, North Dakota on my way home to Virginia after spending a week visiting family in a small town in Missouri outside of Kansas City. The last two times I visited this park, I pitched a small tent and stayed a couple of nights camping there. (See my 2022 posting Camping in North Dakota for a look at my previous setup.)
Since that time, I traded in my trusty KIA Soul and now am driving a Subaru Forester, a much bigger car. I decided to set it up with a bed in the back, so that I could stretch out when camping and/or stopping at rest areas. There are quite a number of options for this, some of which can be homemade, but I opted to go with a car camping platform called the Hele Box by Hele Outdoors. This is a six foot long, height-adjustable platform to which I added a 3 inch memory foam mattress (as you can see in the first photo below). Each of the six legs of the platform is individually adjustable, so I was able to make it pretty level. The storage container for the platform fits underneath it and can be used to store lots of “stuff” while traveling. The second photo below is a selfie I took that shows me lying down on the bed. There is a decent amount of headroom and I figured out an acrobatic way to climb onto the bed from the front seat, which was useful when it was raining.
In thing that I did not change was my little camping stove that I used to heat water for coffee, oatmeal, and instant noodles. As it turns out, I did not do any real camping, but it was handy to use at rest stops to make a quick, hot snack/meal or to take a nap with the windows cracked for ventilation, as you can see in the final photo.
My recently completed road trip was almost 3900 miles (6276 km) and I was able to use this setup repeatedly to rest and recover, as needed, without having to plan stops at hotels along the way. I guess that I like a little more comfort as I get older, but most people will probably say that I am still “roughing it.”
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Mike Powell 