It’s hard to remember a time I had more fun while being so miserable.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I’ve been doing “all of this” — writing about vanlife here, posting pictures on Instagram, and uploading videos to YouTube — and have done very little camping in the van. I’ve slept in my driveway and spent one night in a safe and essentially abandoned parking lot, but I haven’t done a lot of what I set out to do, which is stealth camping. My ultimate goal has always been to use the van to take multiple-day trips and sleep in the van out of convenience and to save money. With that in mind, it’s a little difficult to explain why sleeping or simply hanging out in the van in my own town would be enjoyable… but it is. When I was a kid I made tents out of blankets in my bedroom, made forts in my bedroom out of cardboard boxes, and had a fort in my backyard where I loved to hang out. There’s something I’ve always enjoyed about hanging out in spaces like that, even if my lifestyle today is not compatible with it. I loved sitting inside my backyard fort as a kid but I had no aspirations of living in it, and I feel the same way about the van. It’s fun to go park somewhere and sit and read or work or nap or do whatever, but I don’t want to live in it.

The way this stealth camp came about isn’t exactly the way it’s presented in the video. The video’s narrative is that after receiving a speeding ticket years ago and being forced to pay a fine at my local courthouse, I decided to “get my money back” so-to-speak by using their parking lot as a hotel room. The parking lot happened to be filled with white pickups, suburbans and vans owned by the city, allowing me to hide my own plain white van in plain sight. In reality, things kind of came about in the opposite order — my wife and I spied the parking lot full of white vehicles first and agreed it would be a great place to camp overnight. It was only after discovering the parking lot that I realized it belonged to the courthouse, and it was then I realized that it was the same place I had gone to pay a speeding ticket years ago. Other than this slight chronological bend, everything in the video is 100% on the level.

I’m not at the point yet where my van is fully stocked and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Maybe nobody’s is, I don’t know. Preparing for this overnight trip took way longer than I thought and I could really use a checklist for packing and preparing purposes. The day before my camp, I charged all six of my USB puck lights, multiple USB battery packs, my phone, my camera, my “Fakery” batteries, and so on. When packing I grabbed a laptop, my tablet, two phones, a handheld videogame console, and several other things. I took three backpacks with me: my laptop bag, my camera bag, and my CPAP bag. My wife teased me and asked if I was planning to stay gone for a night or a month.

And then a wrench got thrown into my plans in the form of cold weather. Truth be told, I almost rescheduled the whole thing off. I wasn’t beholden to any schedule here. What would be the harm in moving the date forward or backward a couple of days? And something inside me said… no. I’m not changing the date based on the weather. I own quilts and a sleeping bag. I own a Mr. Buddy heater. And it’s not like I was camping on top of Mount Everest — the courthouse is 10 miles away from my house.

Warming up at IHOP the following morning.

While I won’t spoil everything, you’ll see just how unprepared I was for the cold temperatures. I wasn’t in any danger of freezing to death, but laying under a layer of blankets and staring up at the ice forming on the inside of my van’s ceiling wasn’t as much fun as one might think. The trip was fun and exciting and it was hard to remember those things after my feet were so cold they had gone numb. I asked Santa for some wool socks.

I hope you enjoy the video. I’m still getting the feel for making YouTube videos and sometimes the final product doesn’t exactly line up with the video I saw in my head (or what I thought I was filming), but generally speaking this is the type of video I would like to continue to make and the type of adventures I would like to have. This one still feels like a baby step, but it’s a baby step in the right direction.

And finally, in case I didn’t mention it, I created a separate page for all the things I’ve bought from Amazon for my van so far. All the links are affiliate links, which doesn’t cost you anything to use and earns me a few cents. The Mr. Buddy heater, puck lights, blackout curtains, and everything else that appear in this week’s video are listed on that page. If any of that stuff interests you, links are included for your convenience. Everything on the list is something I personally purchased with my own money, so if you have any questions about anything on the list feel free to ask me about them.