Today's video is about how you don't need to go out and buy one of those crazy expensive van setups. You can actually convert the car that you have today with a small amount of expense into a road trip ready machine. These are some of the tips and tricks that we learned from four months of being on the road. Going on a four month road trip was bar none the best decision I have made in my entire life. One of the key factors in making a long term road trip super affordable is lowering your sleeping costs because aside from food sleeping is going to be your next major cost. Some of these campsites can get up to like 30-40 dollars a night and if you're on the road for months that adds up insanely fast. So if you're new to the channel we actually built a sleeping platform in the back of the RAV and you can check out a bit more details on that in the previous video I made but the basic gist of it is that it's a platform that's raised up from the base of the car and it folds out so that we can have a comfortable sleep because I'm like six feet tall. I can't like curl up in the back of a car and sleep like that for four months it's not going to work out. So it's just wood with hinges that folds out and I have to admit this was a life saver. Being able to sleep in your car every night means you're not only sleeping free but the accessibility of free places to sleep just skyrockets. I'm going to make a video on this in the future about how we found free campsites but when you're sleeping in your car versus sleeping in a tent or even you know pain for car camping at these campsites you can sleep in Walmart parking lots you can sleep in truck rest stops you can boondock in forests and on crannland it just blows your opportunities for sleeping out of the water compared to some of the other options. One of the major things we noticed when we first tested out the sleeping platform though was that we needed a bit more privacy you're going to be sleeping in your car and odds are if you're on the road for a while your car becomes kind of your safe haven. It's the only space that's really yours and so you want to be able to kind of close yourself off to the world at the end of the day and feel like you're not only safe but you also have a good amount of privacy. To solve this issue we actually went out to the dollar store and bought shower curtains which probably cost around two dollars each and we also got some hemp rope so every night what we would do is once we had the bed set up and we were on the inside we would set up these curtains and this was a super super cheap way to give us some privacy from the rest of the world. I remember at one point I don't know if you guys have seen the website the people of Walmart where people are just wearing ridiculous things. I feel like I have a better understanding of those people now at least if they were road tripping I remember waking up one morning and my hair was like everywhere I just looked like Chewbacca and I was in like my boxers with no shirt on standing in the middle of this Walmart parking lot so privacy is important for sure. Another thing is if you are traveling in the summer cars get really really hot on the inside so you're going to need some kind of ventilation of some sort. At the beginning of the trip we decided to just crack the windows until we got to our first destination which was Colarni and if you're from Ontario you know that Colarni is the worst place for mosquitoes and black flies so we would crack the windows at night and there would be flies and mosquitoes getting into the car just these little buzzing demons they just chewed us up. Atlanta at one point had like bites all on her face like swollen lymph nodes some kind of like black fly fever it was not a good time so as soon as we got to the next town we went out and bought these bug screens and this weatherproof velcro and that allowed us to attach screens on the inside of the windows so that way it was ever hot in the car at night we could crack the windows and we could have the peace of mind knowing that bugs weren't getting in and eating us alive at night so that was another key tip that was super important and just made sleeping in the car that much more enjoyable I highly recommend it. Third tip fourth tip I don't I don't know what tip I'm on now but if you have gone on a road trip before for more than a weekend you know that it is a tiny space and with tiny spaces comes the problem of organization it only takes like one morning of this organization and your entire mobile home is just covered in all kinds of clothes like utensils, toilet tree stuff is everywhere it just gets gnarly so fast. What we found super helpful on the road trip was having some kinds of bins or totes to store all of this stuff in and we could kind of categorize or literally compartmentalize all our different stuff we went out to Home Depot and bought these I think they're like 70 something liter blue totes they cost around six dollars each by the way I'll link anything that's available on Amazon below if you guys are interested in buying it but yeah these things were probably like five bucks each and they were a life saver so we had one bin for our foods let's be honest it was mostly ramen in the other bin we had our cooking utensils for cooking more ramen in the third bin we had our clothes and in the fourth bin we had our toiletries and these all fit nicely I actually designed the sleeping platform around these bins so that way we could slide them in and out depending on what we needed this was amazing for food because if you're getting hungry and we both get hungry real quick and it fighting on the road is not a good thing so we needed we needed quick access to that food whether it's just trail mix or something to tie this over or whether we're cooking having the bin sliding in out was super handy and avoided a lot of those hangry situations so all in all with all these things put together we not only had an amazing amount of space left over in the car to throw all of our stuff in but we also had a very safe and comfortable place to sleep at the end of the day when you're tired coming back from hikes and you just want your privacy you know sometimes we would crawl in and we would just set up the curtains and we'd watch like Netflix on your phone because when you're living on the road you need those creature comforts to keep you happy and just raise the spirits from time to time so when you throw all of these tips together you get a sweet road tripping rig for what was probably around $200 maybe $250 at most it's way way more affordable than going out and buying a Westphalia and I've seen this setup accomplished in a Honda fit and that was actually when I first decided that I wanted to make a sleeping platform was because I saw it done in a tiny car so I knew it was possible pretty much in any car at that point anyways I hope you guys like seeing this road trip setup I hope it gave you guys a little bit of information and inspiration so you can get out on the road because it is absolutely life changing and I would recommend it to anyone if you guys like this video please give it a thumbs up it means a ton to me and if you want to see more of our road trip I actually vlogged every single day of it so I'll link it up here and I'm still ongoing with these I think I have like a month left of editing to do for these vlogs so there's still going to be plenty of new content so hit that subscribe button fall along and most of all happy hiking guys