As you may know, our overlanding rig is a 2007 Toyota Tacoma. It’s Michael’s daily driver, and so this is what it looks like most of the time:
The storage platform we built back in 2015 lives in the back of the truck full-time, mostly because it’s a pain in the ass to store it anywhere else. Really though, the platform provides a nice, flat surface area for transporting stuff, and that includes Bailey.
The carpet has since been replaced by black rubber mats… They’re a lot easier to clean.
So that’s what the truck looks like for day-to-day. For trips, we pull out the portable kitchen (read all about our kitchen here) and add on the roof-top tent.
I bet you’re wondering how we go from this…
to this…
You’re in luck! That’s what this blog post is all about.
The first step is to remove the cover off the roof-top tent and then disengage all the tiedown points on the tent itself. We extend the ladder (normally this is my job, but at the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival last weekend I made it a point to record everything instead of, you know, helping) and use the ladder as a lever to open the tent.
After popping open the awning over the ladder, we move on to the rest of the setup.
For shorter trips we don’t normally attach the annex. It increases our setup/breakdown time and in good weather it’s not really necessary. But at bluegrass festivals, or anywhere we plan on being in the same spot for 4-5 days, that annex comes in really handy. We keep our packs and instruments in there mostly, but it’s big enough for a couple of chairs too.
After the annex comes the awning. Even with the trees we need all the shade we can get! In fact, for this trip we borrowed an EZ-Up.
Yeah, this looks like a lot. And… it is. But we weren’t 100% in the shade, in spite of this picture. The sun came up over the vineyard to the east around 7am, and the tent didn’t get full shade until around noon.
So the EZ-Up meant I didn’t have to bake in the sun while waiting for the water to boil for coffee.
One more important step: setting up the Revel Gear lights! I used the white lights under the awning and the Christmas lights around the tent itself – our rig was impossible to miss.
And do you see that tree on the left side of the photo? Well, it was the perfect length away from another tree. You might even call it a “hammock’s length” away.
Yep. Both of us took full advantage of that hammock.
In case you’re wondering, this was an actual bluegrass festival we were at – the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival in Tres Pinos, California. This one’s generally known as a picker’s festival. All of the acts at this festival are local and while they were all quite good, the best music I heard was right there in the campground.