Truck Camper Adventure is proud to present this interview with fellow truck camper owner, David Kiel. This instilled him with a passion for exploring, travel, conservation, and photography. Dave met Jennifer, a native from Colorado, in college in Boulder. With 29 years in the Navy they lived, camped and explored many parts of the country along with their kids.
Time off is spent truck camping, exploring, photography and traveling. But as we got older, the ground got harder, so we kept graduating, first from tents, to tent campers and finally to travel trailers.
Our last trailer was a footer. There the limitations of travel trailers quickly became obvious. We missed a lot of great locations due to the constraints of trailers. The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road was never reached. The great hikes and boondock sites out the road could only be explored in the day since we had to drive back to Escalante to camp at the state park. Our original perception of truck campers was the large top-heavy behemoths. But then we began to see these neat little pop-up truck campers going everywhere.
That hooked us. David Kiel: We visited the three major manufactures of quality built small pop-ups that would fit on our standard bed Tundra: Outfitter, Hallmark and Phoenix in Denver, and the closest dealer of Four Wheel Campers in North Carolina. We live in the heart of Washington DC. The real deciding factor was the total customization that Robby and Cari provide at Phoenix.
After a lot of consultation, they made exactly what we asked for. Living in the city, we thought it would be important to keep the truck camper inside the truck bed so we could leave the tailgate on for extra security. Also not having the camper hang out over the bed would protect it from the poor parallel parkers. The extra inches of length would make taking a shower in the bathroom a lot easier. David Kiel: Phoenix Campers uses a simple internal tie down system that uses ratcheted nylon tie down straps.
