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A few months back, we learned that rent-a-van outfit Escape Camper Van was going out of business and liquidating all of its assets, including the entirety of its fleet of converted rental campers. In a strange twist of fate, somebody I frequently talked cars with in a previous life happened across that post and decided, hey, a used camper van sounds kind of perfect. So he bought one.
It’s a story too boring to retell here, but in another twist, I happened across an old conversation with that same person and decided to take a lap of the internet to see what they were up to. And there it was, staring back me: the image of the same vans I’d written about last year. It took a little more sleuthing to find a way to reach out, but I fired off a message on a whim. Hey, we’d only been out of contact for 15 years. That’s nothing in the age of digital transiency.
Sure enough, he DMed me back, pleasantries (and email addresses) were exchanged, and not long thereafter, Will Angel had furnished me with a full report on “Crayola,” as Escape had named it: a 2012 Ford Econoline with a paint job (not a wrap, believe it or not) to match its name, and, of course, a customized camper interior. It also had nearly 350,000 miles on the clock.
“[A]fter seeing your story on the bankruptcy auction my wife and I had decided to grab the van to try a different kind of bopping-around,” he said. “We’d gotten it for around $4,300 after purchase, auction fees, and DMV bother, and figured that a running E-150 with a clean title and a passed smog test wasn’t going to lose us much money.”
That logic may be unique to California’s used-car market, but $4,300 for a running car with no check engine light is nothing to sneeze at these days, especially something offering this level of utility. But with its custom upgrades, Crayola appealed to a very niche subset of buyers. Angel figured he and his wife were among them.
“We’d picked it up at a freight yard over in Antioch, where it’d been sitting amongst 30 or 40 other Econolines and Transits, and the drive home was curious but not terrifying,” he said. “On further inspection, it had ancient, leaking shocks, needed a ball joint, and the rear brakes were metal-on-metal (the fronts, curiously, were brand-new). Not a ton of effort beyond fluids,” he concluded.
Angel was able to swap some Yokohama Geolandars over from his previous wanderer-spec ride, a Honda Element. They happened to be the right size and load rating, so why not?
Dash upgrades. Will Angel
“We’d also done a bit of work to the interior, but nothing too wild—built a new table, jazzed-up the curtains, laid down wood-esque flooring, installed a cheap CarPlay head unit, and fixed some broken trim,” he told me. “Someone gave us a small raven figurine, so that plus some abalone and mussel-shell findings mean the van now has a raven shrine.”
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