The word is like music, especially when grass turns green, leaves pop out, and winter skies give way to blue.
In Vancouver, we are on the doorstep of the worlds best camping, both in BC and Washington state. The scenery is unparalleled. The opportunity to commune with nature, letting go the stresses of today's busy workplace, is offered to all that will grasp it.
Read on to find out more about our camping experience. But if you want to skip to some other useful material, then try these links (local to this web page):
Useful Camping References in Washington State and British Columbia
Our Camper
A few years ago we purchased a truck and camper combination. This Ford F250 (3/4 ton pickup) with Slumber Queen 10 foot camper meets every need that we could imagine for camping.
The double bed in the cab-over area is spacious, with lots of headroom. This is important because in the past we had owned a motor home and the cab over was a problem causing claustrophobia. Not so with this unit!
As well, the bed is inline with the camper reducing sway.
This diagram illustrates the layout of the camper showing that it really is only good for 3 people. Ok - four if they are small children on the pull-out for the pedestal table.
Everything is very handy, and the interior is very bright because of a skylight in the middle of the roof (between sinks and stove). The many windows also open making it easy to keep the camper cool in hot weather. Where we live in Vancouver, hot weather means 85 F (25 C).
Since then we found that the F250 was too close to its GVW, so we upgraded to a 1990 F350 for which we had body and interior restoration completed. As well we've added a rooftop storage unit to store our inflatable boat and gear.
The Ford F350 dually is a high mileage camper special with about 240k km (approx. 150k miles). It has a 7.5L (460CID) engine with standard and runs on standard gas. Oddly enough, it gets better fuel economy than the F250 which was an automatic.
We've done a lot of body work on it (new doors, hood, rear quarters) and repairs (flair, painting). For the interior we've upgrade to after-market seats which are a delight to sit in on any trip. The camper itself is 1100 kg which is well below the capacity of this 1 ton truck, making it a joy to drive.
As a follow-on, in order to improve performance and fuel economy, we "souped up" the truck with a full power train upgrade. This includes a variety of changes including a rebuilt 7.5L engine (bored), CompCam custom cam, rebuilt head, new water pumps, high power (120AMP) alternator, K&N filter, Doug Thorley tuned performance exhausts, 3" pipes, Magnaflow low-resistance muffler, Dynomax Bullet racing (packed) muffler acting as a resonator, Luk racing clutch, American Eagle alloy wheels (not shown), a full set of Nokian tyres, and many more smaller items.
With such a big truck and heavy load, we consider it's 11.5mpg (imperial) to be quite good, and have on long trips not through mountains seen as high as 13mpg.
In these pictures, we show the F250 as of July-2003 in Washington State where we were camping at Deception Pass State Park. This is a lovely park with some beautiful scenery, beaches, fresh water boating in Cranberry Lake, and of course camping. The F350 is outside our home in the Vancouver area.
