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Hey, I'm Mark. I'm Nives. And this is Hector and this is our base camper.
I was working as a makeup artist in fashion / beauty and I was working as a
commercial TV director mostly for the NFL so we were living pretty urbanized
lifestyles. We lived in in Philadelphia in a nice loft building right in the
heart of downtown so when Nives and I started realizing that we were really
into hiking, climbing, kind of seeing the great outdoors, we realized that it was
gonna be impossible to really get to experience those places without really
getting to spend lots of time there. And the only way we could really spend time
in the place that we wanted to be was to have a mobile living situation. We first
thought we're gonna have the camper be more of a gear holder, but it evolved into
us also us being able to sleep inside. That's why it's not really even as tall
because initially we were just gonna most likely put a rooftop tent on top and
sleep up there. We realized that it had to be a off-road trailer that led us to
an ad on Craigslist where a guy was selling an old Humvee trailer from the
Army. We bought it for 800 bucks, which was a steal because it was in pretty good
condition, started sketching out some ideas and then one day we literally went
to the store, bought some wood, and started framing it out. The thing that I
come back to a lot is that when we first met we started to say, "hey, someday we'll
go and we'll spend time on the west coast.
And someday we'll go spend time in the desert." I think the turning point for us
was those "somedays" kept feeling like they kept getting pushed off further
further, further, and so we just wanted to stop saying "someday" and just start doing
them. We just tried to simplify things as much as possible so we have the time to be
able to experience life as much as we want to.
The first part of the equation
of our mobile living situation is Chevy Silverado. It ends up being really great
for us cuz not only is it really solid on the road, off the road, the truck bed
gives us enough room to store all the camera gear and camping gear that we
need. And then the other great thing about the truck is that it's like the
perfect mobile office for us. We have a cellphone booster in there so a lot of
our work requires us to kind of go back and forth emails, take phone calls, talk
to clients. Downside of the truck is the mileage, it kind of sucks. We only get about
15 miles to the gallon when we're not towing. When we are towing that goes down to
about 11. The coolest thing maybe about the tongue part of this camper is it's
got one of these big pintle hooks on it, which there's a big, no matter how much
the trailer is articulating up, down, left, right, there's no way it can pop off.
These are two golf cart batteries. Pretty standard like two 6 volts in series. Those
give us 235 amp hours of power. Those are charged by a 200 watt panel that's
located on the roof. As part of one of our secondary additions to the camper
this whole nose area where you see these solar panels that was something that we
had wanted to do from the start. When we first started it was just a flat front. It
gives us another 120 watts of solar panels. This bank of panels feeds Goal Zero
Yetis, which are on this side of the camper. And it also allows us to store
some of the common camp tools that we use all the time. So there's a shovel,
which is pretty much how you go number two, and then this block right here it's just
kind of a homemade leveling block. That's been another unexpected beauty of
having the campers that there's only three points of contact so
it's easy for us to level it. This aluminum channel covered with stickers
that is part of our rainwater collection system. Another reason why we really wanted
to build something is there's sustainability aspects that you really
can't find on mass-produced models. Adding the rainwater collection system
being able to collect all the water that comes off the roof for us is huge. It's
proven, it's saved our asses a few times, for sure. If you come around to the side, so this
side serves, it's kind of more of the utilitarian side. We have a bank of Goal
Zero Yetis here which these are great because we use these mostly to charge
our computers. We can lift them out so if we need power for a shoot or just
something else that can't necessarily be right at the camper we can easily pull
those out. You can see the rest of our rainwater collection system. So you saw
in the front it comes out, it collects into a like a gutter almost, from here it
comes in, and my dad actually smartly helped me engineer this, you can either
turn this valve and collect rainwater and it'll just go through this tiny
little particulate filter just to take out any like sand or leaves and then
that comes across over here and fills our 35 gallon tank. So 35 gallons of
water in this tank that we use strictly for washing dishes, for taking showers,
anything that doesn't involve drinking or eating that water. When you're not
camping at a campground like you don't have a table most the time so we really
wanted to have as much table space as we could to get stuff off the ground and we
decided to build these doors so that the bottom section would open up kind of
like one of those old Boy Scout Chuck boxes. So that was the thinking behind
these. They kind of scissor open and you have a little bit of protect from the
elements if it's raining outside. Then this side is the closet so this would be my
side up here. This is Nive's side. These are pretty much 90% of the clothes we
have with us and all the stuff we wear under constant rotation goes in here. We
keep extra clothes like winter clothes or summer clothes depending the season
stored underneath the bed. The kitchen side we should talk about.
So same design as far as like the doors fold down to give you counter space. We
really put an emphasis on food, cooking in the road, and Nives is
really able to create kind of anything most anything you'd be able to create at
home. So we have food storage up top. We kind of devised just rough ways to
store some of our dishes on the road. There's a lot of nesting things. We kind
of figured out a good series of bins to hold our food.
You know organization is kind of one of those evolving things so we eventually
built this custom pantry system that can hold anything from oils to vinegars. We
lined a lot of the things with foam so a lot of the compartments have foam
bottoms so none of these glass jars ever have a problem breaking and some of the
bigger containers like an oil and vinegar we store in these bigger
stainless steel containers. The rest of the kitchen ends up being up here. We use
an ARB 50 quart 12-volt fridge. Just storage for various things. We have a
couple cast-iron pots and pans. This is an ARB 8 foot by 8 foot awning and the
nice thing about this not only does it kind of define the kitchen space, but we
have an entire screen room too that can enclose this so at the height of the
mosquito hatch season in the summer time when it would be impossible to cook
outside any other way, we zip on the mosquito room and we can keep rolling.
This is just a really simple gravity feed so if you need to
wash hands or anything this comes straight out of the 35 gallon tank and
then this year we've been dabbling with a hot water system which is pressurized.
So what this is is another Camp Chef product. Essentially we have a pump
mounted inside the camper. It takes a feed off of that 35 gallon tank and
it'll pump it through here, propane heats it up, and it comes out pressurized. So we
use that for washing dishes, taking a shower. When you fire it up it gets hot
really fast. Basically this is how we travel. We push this back, on two
sides it hooks with a little carabiner that way we can store a couple of things
here and then once we get to a place, put it down, and ooila. We have our little cozy sleeping station in here.
I mostly appreciate the skylights in here which at first we didn't have and it felt
like you were kind of in a wooden box maybe a coffin. We have a way of putting little
shades that's just velcro on and then you're all set. So basically if you want
to stargaze when you're right about to fall asleep you can totally do that.
We have a little storage on the sides for a slot where you can slide in your
computer, book. A really neat thing also that a lot of people appreciate is we
figured out that if we use a magnet and we put a little holder right here we can
have a movie night by just popping on the iPad just like that. A little splitter
where we put each of our own headphones and then watch whatever show. Mark
usually falls asleep in five minutes and then I tell him the next day what happened.
Extra pillows go up here just pop it up like that.
We have mosquito net that rolls down when the bugs are bad so we're actually
pretty good in here. Yeah I think that pretty much sums it up. It's really minimalistic.
To make it sustainable we decided to take our trades which was making films
taking photographs and just pivot them towards the outdoor industry and the
outdoor lifestyle which we were jumping in head first. And so we started a company
called Camp Trend, which is a media production company. A lot of people
always wonder how to do this, how to make it sustainable. I think it comes
down to money which is I feel the same stress as money I feel like if most
people do I don't think it's a good enough excuse to stop you I think wasted
time is way worse than wasted money you have a lifetime to make money and the
money just kind of rolls through sometimes you have a lot of it sometimes
you have no it's even less than none of it but your time is just ticking away
you know none of us really know how we're gonna die or when we're gonna die
your time is still the most valuable resource you have every day that passive
eyes one day less you have I think if you're really serious about trying to
change your lifestyle if something in the alternate lifestyle the mobile
lifestyle really speaks to you it's just a matter of being brave and jumping
right in and I think the rest you'll figure it out me I don't know I think
you just do it you really have to just do it because if you stop and you think
about these things about like all the difficulties obstacles
it's just gonna prevent you from actually doing the things that need to
be done in order to to make it happen make the life easier as it's happening I
hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode if you did be sure to LIKE
comment and subscribe and check us out we're at camp trend run Instagram or on
YouTube thanks for watching peace hello ha great to see you again
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