Ravie and I have been through some shit.
I first bought him back in 2021, well, half of him. My then-girlfriend and I split the cost. When we broke up, I Venmo’d her the other half and made it official. He was mine. Just me and this 2012 Toyota RAV4: a reliable, four-cylinder mule.
Then came the summer of 2022. I was living with one of my best friends and they decided to move deep into the Oregon wilderness. It wasn't even a choice whether to commute an hour each way to work or move into the car.
So I yanked out the seats without an ounce of grace, hit Lowe’s for some plywood and cheap screws and built a slapdash sleeping platform that would make a structural engineer cringe. But it worked. For half a year that humble setup was my bed, my kitchen, my reading nook and yes, my piss-in-the-same-nalgene-bottle bathroom. Ravie was my studio apartment on wheels. No insulation. No fan. Just me, him and the awkward exchange of gaze as people walked by on the sidewalk as i took my morning piss.
We drove everywhere. Mountains, forests, backroads, beach pull-offs. And he never once broke down. Not even a hiccup. Say what you want about comfort, but Toyota RAV4s are a mechanical cockroach, tough, tireless and ready to scuttle across any terrain you throw at them. I chose it because I wanted something that could go anywhere and last forever. And Ravie delivered.
But by winter, Portland’s damp death-grip started to close in. Condensation built up overnight and i had no way of airing him out during the cold days. Soon a fine layer of mildew had colonized on the plywood platform I slept on. I woke up and went to bed in perpetual dampness and there are only so many mornings you can wake up to the smell of damp socks before something has to change. I saught refugee indoors and and used Ravie more like a weekend warrior than full-time home.
Fast forward to Nicole, who didn’t run when I asked her if she wanted to spend a month living in him with me. So we gutted the original build, salvaged what we could, and redesigned everything with two people in mind. From solo cave-dweller to couple’s micro-palace. Ravie, version 2.0.
