When I was younger, my boyfriend and I used to go camping with nothing but his pickup truck, blankets and pillows, and some wood for a fire.  The open bed was fantastic for sleeping in, so who wants to go to the trouble of pitching a tent?

Of course, most of those camping trips were for the sake of getting drunk and not having to worry about being caught (we were underage) or driving home.  Even so, though, the pickup made camping easy!

There were two real problems with camping in the pickup.  One problem was that the ridges in the bed were kind of uncomfortable.  Being metal, the bed was also kind of cold at first.  There are lots of heavy duty plastic bed liners out there that would have solved the latter problem, and some more blankets or maybe even an air mattress would have solved the other problem.

Another problem was that we were exposed, so if it rained, we had to sleep in the cab — which was considerably less comfortable!  If my boyfriend had had a truck rack, like another friend of mine had on his work truck, we totally could have thrown a tarp or something over the top to create a little shelter from wind and rain.

Of course, we probably would have been even better off in a van.  One of my coworkers at my first job out of high school had a Volkswagen bus, with all sorts of van accessories that would have made it really cozy for camping — provided we could get it where we needed to go, of course!

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