The night draws in and you decide its dark enough to actually set up your car for the night and you think to yourself its time that you try and shelter yourself from people looking in. Now what do you decide to do? Do you just not put anything up and hope that nobody sees you? Lets be honest, as soon as you fire up the laptop, you become a glowing beacon in the car. Do you make window covers for EVERY single window in your car? You know that the front and rear windows are going to be a pain to make because they are massive and people are going to see you putting them up.
I’ve thought about these various factors and I’ve decided to go with these! Its a blackout curtain that I got from Amazon and its attached to my handrails by means of a bungee cord for the curtain rail.
Now the car curtain actually has a duel purpose, it acts as a cover for all my stuff in the back. Normally in a RAV4, you’d have a parcel shelf on the back which covers the area from the back seats to the metal bar which olds the parcel shelf and then it goes to the back of the car as well. These bars are great when you are using the car as a normal vehicle, but when you are car camping, you need all the space you can get. So thats why ive taken the metal bar out and I’ve just put the car ‘curtain’ on top of the stuff instead.
So this is the daytime look of the back of the car, at nightime, this car curtain is transformed into a curtain behind the front 2 seats. The curtain as you can see is multipurpose now and stops people seeing in when im asleep and also stops people seeing me power station and my laptop when Im away from the car.
The curtain / boot cover is actually a black out curtain that I’ve had for many, many years and I purchased it from Amazon. As a black out curtain its fantastic, especially in Thailand where I took it to. The sun is a killer in the morning and when you rent an apartment in Thailand, they often skimp on certain things and decent quality black out curtains are one of them.
Ok so now you know the history of the curtain / boot cover / black out curtain, here is how it actaully looks when its set up in the Rav4 – does it look like there is somebody sleeping in there?
This is what I think is the best thing about this set up is that you cant really tell that im sleeping in here, it does not scream camper van, its more of a stelth car camping set up. You can put the curtains up whislt you are sat in the back, you can even set up your setup and then drive to where you want to actually sleep for the night.
The only problem ive found is when you want to lock all the doors whilst you are inside the vechicle, now a lot of people would just turn on the alarm with the key fob, but this is a massive fail as you will probaberbly end up setting off your car alarm in the middle of the night. What you really need to do is to press the lock door button on the drivers side of your car and all the doors are now locked without having to put your alarm on. But I have to actually get to this button, so I need to lift up my curtain in order to reach the button.