After 9 weeks in the beautiful Columbia Gorge we were officially setting sail. Our time in the Big Red House was over and I was abandoning my boss at Mark's Auto to deal with the long line of cars needing repair on his own. Sorry el jefe, adventure awaits, and so does a friend in need.
Our first stop was a pay-it-forward mission. Our new friend Karl, the very Karl from Westy Ventures who saved our broken-down butts a few weeks before, was in a conundrum. He's so busy building and outfitting other people's adventure rigs, that after two years, he still has a barren Sprinter van.
Life, work and time all seemed to be getting in the way of him pursuing his own adventures and van-build. So as time slipped by with him not having so much as a decent rig for weekend camping, his frustration was building.
Well, Jacqui and I decided we would step in and help out the guy who has been helping us for months with motor-swap tips, advice and eventually even building us our new injection pump. We had a flight to catch in San Francisco coming up quick, but we rearranged our time carefully and told Karl we would be showing up for two days; 48 hours of our time was all his. We cautioned him to use the time wisely.
We simply stated, "We'll be there so clear your schedule and make sure you have some building materials ready! Let's make a beta-camper!"
Two days is hardly enough to build a fully-self-contained adventure mobile, but we could at least get some insulation, walls and a bed platform installed quickly enough to let him do a road-trip to the east coast to spend time with the family for the holidays. After all, Karl sells adventure vehicle fridges and heaters so he could easily throw a few things in the van to have a rudimentary camper.
I'm here to say, insulating and walling an entire cargo-van takes a lot longer than we thought, but we hustled and accomplished our mission in time for Karl to take his road trip. The best part is that even though Karl thinks we were there to help him, secretly we were just there to learn some tricks towards building our own rig from scratch some day. *Wink, wink.*
See you next time we're North-bound Karl!
Some of Karl's Photos!