Blue View – Finding a Van?... Trailer?... Camper?

Blue - our van conversion

Over the last few months, I’ve been grousing about replacing Blue, our Ford Transit camper conversion. We sold Blue just over a year ago, and have been tent camping when possible ever since. We love road trips and camping, but tent camping isn’t the ideal solution for us… it was meant to be a temporary solution until we found a better replacement for Blue.

Summer tent camping is great… winter tent camping, not so much

First, we looked for a newer cargo van that we could upfit into a camper. We soon discovered that cargo vans, like most vehicles these days, are scarce and waaaay overpriced. The few new ones we found on dealers’ lots were getting 25%-30% over MSRP, and used ones were going for more than new prices. I found a nearly new one on Craigslist in the San Francisco area… the sticker price was $42k and he was asking $50k. When I contacted him, he said he had only posted it a day earlier, and there were currently 14 people bidding on it. The highest current bid was $58.5k, and did I want to bid higher? I politely declined. He may well have gotten 50% over sticker when the bidding came to an end. Wow!

An Airstream Basecamp trailer

Next, we looked at small camping trailers that could be pulled with our Sorento. There is a slew of cute little trailers out there, and several of our friends have recommended them. We didn’t find any that matched our criteria, however, and like vans, the inventory is low and the prices are high.

A nice cargo trailer conversion

The next plan was to convert a cargo trailer into a camper. (I even wrote a blog about the possibility). It might not be as aesthetically pleasing or aerodynamic as a manufactured camping trailer, but we could certainly upfit one that would serve our purposes without, hopefully, being too ugly. I found dozens of blogs and YouTube videos on the subject, and some conversions were pretty nice. All we’d need is a lightweight cargo trailer in the right dimensions, and I found a host of manufacturers that made aluminum trailers in just the size we’d want. The only caveat - most cargo trailers come with a ramp rear door, and we’d want one with barn doors in the rear instead.

Since we were in New England at the time and would be driving back to Las Vegas, just about any trailer dealer or private party that had one that fit the bill in the east or midwest part of the country could be on our route. I set to work searching for one. After a week spent searching every dealer’s inventory and checking Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace in every metro area between Boston and San Francisco, I turned up exactly zero. There were several of the heavier models and a few lightweight models with ramp doors (all at quite a premium price, BTW), but none that matched our criteria. I called several manufacturers to see about the delivery of a new one, but the timeframes varied from “don’t know” to 14 months.

Finally, Plan D was to see whether we could find a reasonably priced van conversion that we could work with. We did find several that weren’t too far from what we wanted, and which we could probably travel in quite happily. Just like everything else, however, the prices are sky high… probably 30%-40% higher than what we would have paid a year ago.

So, what to do? Is this the new reality? Will prices continue to rise, and therefore, should we bite the bullet and buy something now? Or is this a bubble… will prices come back down to reality in a year or so when supply catches up with demand?

If only I had a working crystal ball. But then, if I did, I would have bought Apple stock at $22 in 1980, and buying a million-dollar motorhome now would have been chump change.

Stay tuned – I’m sure we’ll come to some resolution before too long...