We Bought a Van and Drove Across 5 States

I bought the van on a Tuesday from a guy named Gary who was mostly just relieved someone finally wanted it. Cargo van, no windows in back, 140,000 miles, a faint smell of somebody's old job that I never fully identified, $6,800 cash, title in hand by 4pm.

I did not have a plan. I had a mattress topper, a cooler, a list of five states I wanted to see, and a start date exactly nine days out because I'd already told everyone I was doing this and backing out felt worse than the risk of it going badly.

Nine days to turn a windowless cargo van into something you can sleep in for a week and a half, then drive it from Oregon through Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and into New Mexico. That was the whole plan. That was the entire plan.

The Question

Can you actually do a real van life road trip on a bare-bones budget build, no proper insulation, no real electrical system, no permanent bed platform, and have it hold together for five states and ten days without becoming miserable or genuinely unsafe?

Every van build video shows the $30,000 finished product. Nobody shows the version where you're sleeping on a mattress topper on plywood because that's what fit in the timeline and the budget.

The Setup

The van itself: $6,800, a 2019 cargo van bought used with no prior camper conversion, purely a work van in its former life. Build budget, separate from the van cost: plywood subfloor and a simple platform bed with storage underneath ($340), a secondhand foam mattress topper ($95), a portable power station for charging phones and running a small fan ($260), a cooler and basic kitchen box setup ($140), reflective window covers for privacy and temperature ($60), and a portable camp toilet for emergencies ($75). No solar, no permanent electrical, no built-in water tank, we used refillable jugs.

Route: Oregon to New Mexico, roughly 1,450 miles one direction, planned stops through Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, with no fixed daily mileage target, just a rough sense of where we wanted to be by which day.

Ground rule going in: ten days total, no hotel nights unless something genuinely broke and forced it, and we'd track every dollar spent, gas, food, campsites, everything.

What Happened

Day two, somewhere in eastern Oregon, the reflective window covers I'd rigged with suction cups started falling down every time we hit a bump, which meant re-suctioning them at every gas stop and quietly accepting that suction cups were never going to be the real fix. I zip-tied a permanent solution together at a rest stop using leftover plywood scraps and it held for the rest of the trip.

The power station died faster than advertised, real-world use versus the box's claimed runtime being two very different numbers, and by day three we were charging phones off the van's actual cigarette lighter more than the power station, which worked fine but meant running the engine longer than I wanted to just to keep devices alive.

Idaho is where the heat became the actual story of the trip. No insulation meant the van was genuinely unbearable by early afternoon, and we adjusted the whole schedule around it without discussing it much, just started driving at 6am, parking somewhere shaded by 11am, and not doing much of anything until the evening cooled off. That wasn't the plan, it just became the plan by day four out of necessity.

The moment that actually surprised me was Utah, a random dirt pull-off near Capitol Reef that wasn't on any list I'd researched, where we ended up staying two nights instead of one because it was quiet, free, and had a view that made the whole windowless-van-smell-of-Gary's-old-job thing feel worth it. That wasn't a place I found planning this trip. It was a place I found because we had nowhere specific we had to be.

Colorado brought the one real scare: a rattling noise from underneath the van on a mountain grade outside Durango that turned into an unplanned stop at a mechanic in a town I can't find on most maps. Loose heat shield, not catastrophic, $180 and two hours to fix, but two hours of genuinely not knowing if the trip was about to end early in a way I hadn't budgeted for financially or emotionally.

We made it into New Mexico on day nine, one day ahead of the ten-day mark, and spent the last night just outside Taos doing nothing in particular, which after nine days of near-constant adjusting and fixing and re-planning felt like the actual reward of the whole thing.

What Went Wrong

The heat was the single biggest miscalculation. No insulation is fine for a weekend, it is not fine for ten days across the high desert in late July, and if I did this again in summer I would not skip that line item no matter what it cost.

The power station was a bad purchase, real capacity nowhere close to the marketing, and I'd research actual reviewed runtime numbers next time instead of trusting the box.

The heat shield issue cost real money and real time we hadn't planned for, and it's a reminder that buying a 140,000-mile van without a pre-purchase mechanic inspection, which I skipped because Gary seemed trustworthy and I was in a hurry, is a real gamble every time, even when it works out.

The Verdict

Would do this again, and I'm already planning the next one with two changes locked in: real insulation and a proper pre-purchase inspection, both non-negotiable next time regardless of what they add to the budget or timeline.

Good for anyone who can tolerate genuine discomfort and unplanned days in exchange for the kind of stop you'd never find on a schedule, like the Capitol Reef pull-off. Bad for anyone who needs a fixed itinerary or can't handle real mechanical uncertainty on the road, because something will go wrong and you need to be okay improvising the fix.

The bare-bones build works. It's just genuinely bare bones, and you should go in knowing exactly what that costs you in comfort, not just in dollars.

Steal This

• Get a pre-purchase inspection on any used van before you buy it, no matter how trustworthy the seller seems or how short your timeline is. $100-150 for an inspection is nothing against a breakdown two states from home.
• Insulation isn't optional for anything longer than a weekend or in real heat. It was the one corner we cut that actually cost us comfort every single day.
• Build in zero fixed daily mileage targets. Our best moment of the whole trip came from having nowhere we had to be that day.
• Track every dollar from day one. Our real total was $3,260 all-in including the van, and having that number solid meant we could actually answer whether it was worth it instead of guessing.