Our Adventure Rigs

Our history with the truck, upgrades and additions.

this is about how to make a great thing even BETTER so we’ve picked 7 seven of our favorite modifications under $35 to share with you here!

This summer, the rough plan is to drive from our home in Carbondale, Colorado to Alaska through Canada on a roughly 10,000 mile round-trip journey over the course of about 4 months…

Early last spring we took a trip down to southern Utah and had a blast pushing Peanut into some beautiful new areas. Too bad we lost the SD card that had all the gnarly 4x4ing footage! We’ll just have to go back.

This particular weekend, we decided to attempt to hike to a remote slot canyon that had eluded us a few years back but this time, armed with better route beta, a slightly more capable vehicle, and many more miles of off-road driving under our belts, we were ready to give it another shot!

With a big snow storm rolling in over Valentine’s Day, we decided that it’d be fun to take Peanut out to go get snowed in and test out our winter camping set up.

With our windows in and the additional light that they now provided it was time to start moving on to the build out portion of the box. The plan was to start with the bed. We would use that as a work space later as we moved into building out bench seats that would double as water storage.

When the box showed up it was pretty dusty and dirty. It seemed like it might have sat for a very long time in Yermo, California with the door open and seemed like a small family of birds may have also taken up residence in there for a while.

We found an S-280 shelter up for auction on govplanet.com in Yermo, California. We made the decision that it was the right box for us based on its size, location, condition, and potential price. Thankfully we were able to win the auction at a very reasonable price, and started making moves to get it shipped to us.

The Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route has been something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. In mid August we completed the section closest to us that connects Leadville to Gypsum with with the intentions of doing the trip over three days and two nights.

Less than a year into dating we decided that we were going to buy a van together, turn it into a sweet little camper, and move into it together to save money on rent and spend more time playing outside.

These are the lights that we chose to go with. I really liked that they had a turn signal built into the light…

Last but not least on this post is shackles, and tow straps…

Anyone who has driven one of these trucks knows that they are big, and that reversing them into tight spots can be challenging, especially in the dark with the trucks incredibly useless reversing lights. So it was time to make a change.

One of the very first projects that we tackled on Peanut was resealing the hatch on the roof of the cab which in its former military life was meant to have either a large caliber gun or grenade launcher mounted in (wtf?!).

Brian had been oooing and ahhhing over these LMTVs for a while and I never really took him seriously about wanting to own one and certainly didn’t think that people like us could ever (would ever) own a monster truck like that.

Hey there! We wanted to start this blog out by writing a little something about why we chose a retired military cargo truck to turn into a camper and maybe our next full time home. Here is the short list of features that we wanted our next home on wheels to have…