Our Eurovan at the North Rim Grand Canyon National Park

We purchased White Cloud, our 1997 Eurovan, in 2001 and took our first road trip to Utah that year.   The van had 62,000 miles on it when purchased and now has over 110,000 miles with three trips to the Southwest, a trip to California and many trips to Washington National and State Parks.

Our van came with a few cool extra features and since we have done a few things ourselves.   The previous owner built an upper bunk frame that holds the bunk up with the top so that the mattress doesn’t need to be stowed when the top is up.   They also added a DC/AC converter so there is some AC power in the van when not plugged in.   Also added was a carrier for the drain pipe on the back and a holder for the AC cord in the back.

We added a Fiamm rack to the back including the cargo box so that we can hold extra gear on some trips.  We have used this to hold our foldable kayaks on one trip.  We added carpet and floor mats from GoWesty which help keep things a bit cleaner.  We also added a solar charger for our iDevices to the front windshield, this worked out well on the last trip and allowed us to charge our iPads from the van.

The Eurovan is a great small camper but is often an adventure in and of itself.   We have had something go wrong on many trips from our awning blowing off in Zion to our cooling fan exploding in Arches.  The Norcold refrigerator is probably the biggest pain point and often requires much patience to get running on propane and above 8,000′ rarely, if ever, works.   The beds are not ideal but we keep working on that.   Still, the van works for us and we like the minimalist approach to RV camping that it provides.