New Wheels

By: Heather

We bought a thing! A new to us 12-passenger Ford Transit! It is disappointingly white but spending thousands of dollars to paint it iridescent orange was not exactly in the budget.

So backstory: In 2014, shortly after we started our full-time RV journey, we bought a van. It was a 2004 Toyota Sienna that had been sold at auction and fixed up by a student trying to pay his way through college. We paid $5,000 for that little van and it was money well spent. That thing traveled all over the country and often pulled our box trailer as well. I was spoiled with that van. It had heated leather seats and automatic doors and the back seats folded flat into the floor, I mean, what else could a girl ask for?

Well eventually it did get old. 265,000 miles and 15 years old plus 10 of those years had been spent in Ohio with winters full of salty roads. A recent repair shop in California said there was so much rust on it that many of the parts they were trying to remove were fused together to other parts. Plus, now as a family of 6 we only had one extra seat and we often wanted to haul more than one extra person. Several times I (being the smallest) was the one who ended up sitting on the floor when we had extra people riding along. It was not very fun for me.

So now we have the Transit. We have named it Baymax since it is big and white and… fluffy?

“Hello, I am Baymax, your personal transportation assistant. Are you satisfied with your ride?”

Seriously though, it is much less scary to drive than I first assumed. There are lots of mirrors to alleviate blind spots, it accelerates surprisingly well, we had a backup camera installed shortly after we bought it, and I am really (surprisingly) enjoying being up higher. I can see so much more of the road and surrounding cars since I tower over most of the other vehicles now. Also, now I can always find Baymax in a busy parking lot as the roof is about 8′ tall instead of the average 6′ tall vehicles around it. I am, however, limited on the parking garages I can fit into now.

My kiddos really like it too. Though they do still fight over seats. Go figure. The kids have lots more room and there is a lot of room for storage in the back since the van was designed to accept yet another row of seats bringing the total to 15 seat. We looked at one of the 15-passenger vans, but it left ZERO room in the back for anything else, so we opted for the 12-person setup.

Notes from Kevin:

If we are going to use the Transit for the foreseeable future, we might as well make it the best fit for us. Therefore, I took no time at all to begin popping off trim pieces and drilling holes to customize it. Heather just shook her head as she looked over the array of plastic trim pieces laid out on the ground next to the van less than 24 hours after we purchased it. Everything went back together the way it came apart, but the Transit now has two extra 12-volt outlets, 2 sets of Anderson Power Pole connectors, a 500 watt power inverter, a VHF/UHF ham radio with antenna, and 2 lock boxes for firearms installed. We are now set to travel!