Car Camping Platform Build
A reminder of the limitations of my handiness
I’ve never been much of an outdoorsman. Sure, a good chunk of my childhood was spent outside playing sports, but more traditionally rugged experiences from my youth were limited to pitching a tent in my parent’s backyard with a neighborhood friend to simulate a camping trip. More recently, a few friends and I had taken a week-long road trip to a few parks in AZ/UT/CA and spent a few nights camped out by the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree. I had assumed that June nights in the southwest US would be temperate. I was very wrong, very cold, and woefully unprepared to handle the 40-degree nights.
That trip served as an inspiration to do more hiking, and a reminder to do more research! Seeing as roughly 30 nights of my upcoming trip will be spent in and around national parks and trails, I’ve spent some time mulling over a viable, comfortable, safe way to sleep. Much of my research involved picking the brains of a few friends that have completed car camping trips. I’ve decided to go that route as well!
In addition to being relatively green as an outdoorsman, I am comparably uninitiated as a craftsman. This isn’t news to me, but it has been (painfully) reinforced throughout this build. Luckily, my good friend Brendan is as handy as he is generous with his time; he agreed to help out with the build. Earlier this year, Brendan taught me how to put up drywall and install a P-trap. He’s a wealth of knowledge regarding anything in the home-improvement vein.
A number of very shrewd folks have made helpful YouTube videos detailing their own car camping builds. I drew up some blueprints inspired by those tutorials and left to meet Brendan so we could load up my car with the materials.
I had forgotten to eat lunch the day of the build, but parked next to a hot dog truck in the Home Depot lot. How fortuitous!
On the way to Brendan’s home, one of the bungee cords tethering the 4’x8’ sheet of plywood to my roof rails snapped off. I had to finish the drive with my left hand out of the window pinning down the plywood to the roof of my car, but we made it without further incident.
Despite breaking the cardinal adage of “measuring twice and cutting once” more times than I’d like to admit, the platform came together pretty much as planned! It’ll allow me to sleep in the back of my car and store everything I’ll need for the trip underneath my bed.
In the coming weeks, I still need to cover the plywood with carpet so that the platform can be assembled and disassembled without scraping the car interior. I’ve purchased a few inches of memory foam that will be cut to size to top the platform. Might as well be as comfortable as possible for a trip of this length, right?
Brendan’s soon-to-be 5 year-old son helped test out the structural integrity of the platform at this juncture. When the front seats are pushed forward, the platform has a extra piece that can be hinged out to extend the total span. There’s enough length to make room for me to lay down without needing to bend my knees. The whole thing can be set up and broken down by two people in about five minutes.
At this point, most of the planning and building for the trip is complete. I’m just about a month out from departure and tying up loose ends to make sure parking and lodging goes smoothly.
Now feels like a good time to share that I’ve enjoyed writing about this experience much more than expected. I haven’t written much of anything of this length since college; this blog was largely born out of a desire to record the trip justly and share some updates with friends and family. I expect to publish weekly-ish updates throughout my travels.
That’s all for now! Call or shoot me a text/email if you have any last-minute words of advice before I take off :)