I took the next step tonight, and this is it.

Last month I got a pretty good deal on a truck, as far as I yet know. High miles, but with substantial replacement work done to the engine. A crew cab, with the minimal back seats and suicide doors. Most gratifying, an eight-foot bed behind the big cab (making the whole apparatus 20 feet in length), and of course it’s 4WD.

Then I needed a sleeping kind of bed for that pickup kind of bed, and that was a lot more complicated.

What I really wanted was a pop-up camper, which is just like an ordinary truck camper, but more like the height of a truck cap while you’re driving it around. It pops up only when parked wherever you’re making camp, giving it standing room and also room for a king bed to crash on.

For budgetary reasons I was hoping to find a used one. That plan fell apart because of a fixable reason (used ones that aren’t decrepit are rare), and then an unfixable reason–the old ones are heavy and mostly deal-breaking heavy for a half-ton pickup’s payload.

Next I thought I’d bite the bullet and just spend 10K, or even 15K, on a new one. The problem here is that even for those prices, there is no inventory sitting around. The lead times from order placement to actual delivery were going to be six months at the very least, and a year or more at most places. No way I was going to wait that long.

Plan C. Just three days ago, I was all set to buy a cargo trailer.

Plenty of space there, over a hundred square feet of unbuilt real estate to make into a tiny home, and almost no payload worries, because in any truck you can tow a whole lot more weight than you can plunk down in the truck bed itself.

There was a pretty good supply of used ones, but people are asking (and I have no doubt getting) only about a thousand dollars less than brand new, even for trailers that are four or five years old. So new it was, and somewhere between 9 and 10K just for that big shell, without so much as a camping mattress. But I was seriously ready to hit it.

The day after I settled on that, I got to thinking, while I wandered around my new old truck with a tape measure. Certainly buying a trailer didn’t mean that the 8-foot bed had to just be extra wasted space. The truck came with a big rack on it already, variously called a lumber rack or a ladder rack, and a big locking toolbox too. So I wondered if I could build on that, enclosing it to some degree … not creating a whole dreamy pop-up on my own, but something. Somehow, yeah?

I watched some DIY videos and came up with at least a roofish type platform laid on top of the lumber rack. That would still leave four sides to enclose somehow, and it would be barely tall enough to sit up in … hell I might as well just buy a truck cap at that point (three grand, less whatever I could get by selling the rack) …

But my mind kept coming back around to that platform, and the space above the top of the rack. What could I do with that?

Eventually I started thinking about a solution I had rejected a long time ago. A Roof Top Tent.

The truck bed is eight feet, but the rack is thirteen.

With the tailgate down that’s another two. Almost double the existing bed space. If only there were a way, to connect up eight or ten feet of the rack down to five or seven of what lay below.

What finally clicked was rotating the tent and annex. Most of the time when you see an RTT, they’re deployed like you see in the picture, with a third of the tent and the whole annex piece hanging over the side, because often RTT vehicles are quite small (like that Jeep), with limited roof space. But …

There was virtually no lengthwise constraint, on my big old truck, so …

What if the annex dropped into the truck bed, instead of going past the tires down to the ground? What if the ladder just took you down from the sleeping area atop the platform into the bed, and enclosed a good chunk of it in the process?

Yeah. It’s a hack, but a pretty elegant hack. Maybe. I think? Yeah, it could work.

So. You can pay four grand or more for the perfect RTT.

At the start I would have happily paid two, maybe two and a half, for a pretty good one.

But tonight I found an unspectacularly decent one on sale for a penny under a thousand dollars, plus another three hundred for the annex part. I researched the hell out of this particular model and the consensus was: Yeah, it’s no Cadillac, but it’s very close to just as good as the nicer ones costing two or three times as much.

The main thing I’m giving up is a hard shell that contains the folded up tent while you’re headed down the road. My new one wraps up into a soft-sided cube instead. I can live with that, for this price. Saving two thousand on that is two thousand I can spend on plumbing the rig with a hot water heater, a shower, a sink. Or solar power. Or two thousand to put in savings for building a house on the lot down in Cienega town.

I have a lot of ideas.

Soon I’ll be down in Hell Valley to pick it up and to try and talk the installer I bought the RTT from into sharing my vision, instead of trying to sell me an overpriced rack to replace the one I already have. I will bring my samurai face, and my cordless drill to the fight.

Then finally the fun part can get underway.