Just in case there is another On-The-Road (“OTR”) adventure in my future, I decided it was time to retire—or perhaps upgrade—some of my camping gear.
Of course, readers of my blog know that I retired my loyal Defender (“Chuck”) two years ago this week and brought home an Ineos Grenadier. Chuck, however, is enjoying a well-deserved retirement in his new parking space and will now be used during the more temperate months. In fact, after removing the driver’s and passenger’s side windows –with great difficulty and at great cost--- for the first time in 26 years, I suspect I’ll be driving him more often than I have these past two years. I had forgotten how much fun it is to drive with the front windows removed and all the side and rear windows rolled up. I can certainly understand why some people are willing to pay well north of $100,000 for one in excellent condition—which Chuck most certainly is. In the meantime, Chuck is going nowhere but with me, that is, until I have an offer in hand I cannot refuse.
To replace my 26-year-old nylon cooler, which served me well over 150,000 miles of road trips, I bought a Boeger CRH 9QT 12-volt portable refrigerator. Frankly, it’s all I need to keep Annie’s food, some salad fixings, leftovers, and perhaps even an unfinished bottle of fine wine cold. The built-in battery charges while I drive and will keep the refrigerator running for up to 14 hours when I’m off-grid overnight. Better yet, it eliminates my need to install the roof-rack mounted solar panel system to power just a refrigerator, which would have set me back $2000.
Just to be safe, however, and to keep my iPad, iPhone, satellite phone, tent lamp, fan, and headphones charged, I also bought an EcoFlow River 3 Plus power station. I added a set of portable solar panels as well, just in case I end up stranded somewhere—which, as longtime readers know, has happened from time to time, sometimes for both more time and times than I had planned.
Several years ago, I upgraded my sleeping accommodations by switching to a low-to-the-ground cot. While comfortable, it proved to be more hassle than it was worth. So, this time I invested in a Lunolife AIR+FOAM Pro Camping Mattress.
I searched for one of the custom mattresses made specifically for the rear of the Grenadier, but there were none, and the closest model were unsuited for my needs. I didn’t want to have to slide the front seats forward every night just to take advantage of the pillow extension on my Goose Gear rear-seat-delete platform. Instead, I chose Lunolife’s standard rectangular AIR+FOAM Pro mattress, which I can use equally well inside the Grenadier or in a tent.
The fit is almost perfect. The mattress is 67 inches long, while the distance from the center console to the rear doors is also 67 inches. It will overlap the 22-inch rear-seat delete pillow extension platform extension by about 18 inches, leaving roughly four inches of space along the side of the vehicle, and will then overlap the 11-inch center console by about seven inches. That still leaves plenty of room (26” X 29”) for Annie’s bed beside me.
Although I am taller than the 67 inches of the mattress, if I ever want to use the full 73-inch sleeping length available with the platform extension in use, I simply have to push the front seat forward and toss a pillow onto the extension. The four-inch space between the mattress and the wheel well will also provide a handy place to store the items I’ll want close at hand during the night while bivouacking inside the Grenadier, bear spray, a book, my iPad, a bottle of wine, etc.
Although I expect that most of my gear will be able to be stowed in the rear on the road, when I am using the rear of the Grenadier for sleeping, it will have to be stowed on the roof rack or outside under a tarp.
Below is a diagram of the sleeping arrangement in the Grenadier’s Presidential Suite.
Having never really slept inside a vehicle before—except for those few memorable nights in grizzly bear country when I bivouacked in the Defender’s front seat—I also bought a small rechargeable fan to improve ventilation in either the Grenadier or the tent. I already have window screens for the Grenadier’s rear side windows, allowing me to leave them open on pleasant nights, except in bear country or during cold weather.
Finally, no matter where I bivouac or what the weather is, I always try to set up some sort of shelter to eat and relax under in rain or shine. To me, a campsite simply isn’t complete without one. In that regard…
…one of the biggest challenges in making camp has always been finding a suitable place to pitch a shelter tarp and then taking the time to rig it before darkness fell. If I couldn’t find a convenient spot for a freestanding shelter, I would tie the tarp off the side or rear of the Defender. It worked, but it was always time-consuming—sometimes at exactly the wrong moment, just as the sun was disappearing.
When I ordered the Grenadier, I finally gave in and ordered a permanent, roof-mounted awning for about $2,000. But when I picked up the vehicle two years ago this week, I discovered that the awning sat too high above the roof rack for the Grenadier to fit into my garage. So off it went.
Since then, I searched high and low unsuccessfully for a lower-profile awning. Eventually I abandoned the idea altogether after realizing that even the best awning couldn’t match the versatility of a good old-fashioned tarp.
With the help of ChatGPT (“CHIP”), I decided to design my own system.
After many hours of back-and-forth engineering discussions, I settled on an Aqua Quest Defender (no relation to Chuck) Heavy-Duty 10-by-10-foot tarp. It was the only tarp I could find that uses sewn tie-down loops instead of grommets, with spacing that appeared to line up almost perfectly with the tie-down rings on my roof rack from which the tarp would be hung.
As luck would have it, my rough measurements suggest that the distance between the relevant roof-rack tie-down rings and two of the tarp’s tie-down loops is almost exactly 57½ inches. My guess is that when the tarp actually arrives, it will either be slightly short or slightly long. If it’s short, that’s easy enough to compensate for. If it’s a bit long, it will require a little ingenuity to remove the slack. Fortunately, that’s part of the fun of planning --- working out all the kinks in advance.
The diagram below shows the basic concept.
Compared with an off-the-shelf awning, this DIY design offers several advantages. It can be deployed from either side or the rear of the Grenadier, or relocated entirely and strung between trees when that makes more sense. And, of course, the total cost is roughly one-tenth that of a commercial awning. When it’s time to break camp, I can simply roll up the tarp around the support poles, strap the bundle to the roof rack, and be on my way in just a few minutes.
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