It was about this time of year, 3/15/1999 to be exact, that we bought our first recreational vehicle together. I had owned a pop-up camper before we were married and, also, enjoyed many years doing van camping with my parents on various vacations, so this van experience was quite natural for me.

Since we had started our own business and had somehow started taking our wares to various trade shows around the country, we decided it was time to get something that we could travel in that would also allow us to tow our inventory.

This worked out well for us while we had it and we were able to travel the entire country, east to west and north to south, a few times before needing to move to something with more room. That story will have to wait for another time.

This van/camper was a precursor to the “vanlife” custom vans you see today. This was one of the best designed and well thought out campers we have ever seen. For the time that it was manufactured, it was forward thinking and so much fun to travel in. The company is still in business today and, of course, they are now building their camper-vans on the Promaster/Sprinter chassis that is so very popular in custom builds today.

I will be writing some more posts about a few of the trips we took and the versatility of the van in the next month, as I have just come across a collection of photos that we want to share. For this post, let me point out a few of the really smart features of our van that were so inovative at the time.

In the photo below, you can see that there is a track above my head. This is a circular track runner for a shower curtain that is neatly tucked into the cabinet in front of me. The floor I am standing on is actually a shower pan that drains to the grey holding tank. The shower had hot and cold water and the shower head/hand wand was located inside the cabinet in front of me with the mirror. This cabinet also contained the toilet.

Behind me in the photo above was the galley area, complete with a fridge, microwave, gas stove, and sink. The view in this photo is from the back bed area looking forward to the driver and passenger seats. You cannot see them because we have lots of product and work stuff piled up there in this shot.

The view from front to back (below) shows the bed area and some more cabinets. The cabinet on the right houses a television. Unfortunately, it was not a flat panel type that we have today, but it was awesome at the time. The cabinet to the left is the bathroom (the one with the mirror) and another cabinet for storage. These two back cabinets hung over the bed with a clearance of over 12″ so sleeping with our feet under them was no problem at all. There were upper cabinets in the very back, and a permanent curtain that could be slid up and down on rails over the window on the sides.

The cabinet in the center was movable. To make the queen sized bed, you had to put that cabinet on the floor towards the foot of the bed and flip the wood piece it is sitting on forward. This provided the base platform for the bed. Like most van dwellers, even today, we just kept it as a bed 99% of the time. You could also use it as a dining room, as the hole in the floor (in the photo below) was there for a post that held a table top piece of wood that was neatly stored elsewhere.

I hope you enjoyed this quick look back at the van that started all of our Shanty Travels. This was the only vehicle for our travels that we purchased new from a dealer and I can say that that was probably the only mistake we made. The van was amazing and perfect for our needs at the time. It gave us so many ideas of how to build our own vehicles, from the Big Red Bus to our current van, Loki.

This post was written in March 2026. We are writing these posts, and backdating them, as we come across the photos in an attempt to fill in the gaps in our travel timeline on our site. More coming soon!