Our Overlanding Truck Setup and Gear
If you told me a year ago that we’d be spending most weekends overlanding and backcountry camping in remote and beautiful areas of BC, I’d have told you, “you’re nuts.”
Then add to that watching The Office in “bed” from our truck tent on our rigged up iPad with a comfy queen mattress situation going on, and you start to realize, it is nuts!
We love it out here for obvious reasons. We get to access and enjoy some of the most remote areas in BC and the Pacific North West! But we like to do it while being comfortable—and practical.
We love overlanding for the obvious—just check out the places we’ve been to recently on our new account: @PNWOverlanding. The experience is one thing, but we also love that overlanding is mobile and safe when compared to ground tent camping. It’s kind of like glamping, but rugged and with less water unresistant furniture and flammable decor (what’s with that! lol). Anyhow, now I regret using the word glamping in this instance… I digress. What I’m trying to say is we like to make overlanding as cushy as possible because, well, we like our creature comforts! We also love doing the research to find cool, niche stuff that’s reasonably priced and good quality. Finding a $15 foldable fabric dog food bag and bowl is half the fun, we think.
Anyhow, we use our primary vehicle as our overlanding rig (we call him George Michael, short for George Michael Car—GMC, get it?) because I said it out loud once and we couldn’t unhear it. Anyhow, we made a few modifications to the truck so it could perform and make it over uncertain terrain more safely and easily. We gave him a 1.75” lift using a ReadyLift kit, and installed new 17 x 9 Pro Comp steel wheels with Goodyear Duratracs tires. They’ve made it over everything from snowy boulder rocks to soft sand. We also installed a Leitner Designs Active Cargo System rack and bought a Tepui Kukenam 3-person tent to go on top (we sleep off the ground about 7’).
While this was happening, we bought all the things needed to camp (like solar power packs and lanterns, sealed bins for camp gear, bear safety stuff, a cooler, water jugs, a table and chairs etc). It cost us a few hundred bucks, but we spend so much time sleeping on our truck, it’s worth it for us.
Overlanding is our vacation. The investment in gear is in investment in our future vacations!
After our first few trips, we realized that having no cell signal kinda sucked, for everything from streaming music to if we ever had to text or call someone. We looked out for a signal booster, and then Mike found weBoost.
We ended up getting the Drive 4G-X OTR which essentially boosts existing cell signal in weak areas and amplifies it into homes, or in our case, into vehicles. Truck drivers actually use them a lot! I should mention that it doesn’t actually provide a cell signal from thin air, rather, it picks up on anything close and gives it a range boost—it takes our phones from 1 bar of service to 2 or 3 which is awesome! It was easy enough to install (we mounted ours with a series of RAM mounts so we can swivel it horizontal when driving and not using it).
Anyhow, that’s what we ended up doing to our truck, George Michael. Never did I think I’d type that sentence, haha...
From the moon-like beach in Pacific National Park to Lillooet’s Texas Creek Road and camping at Della Creek, we discover some crazy scenes out here, and can’t wait for another weekend of overlanding tomorrow!
x, S
