Vehicles

“I think you do actually… but you may not feel comfortable providing it.”

We are stopped in front of the clinic and Mark is staring into me with even more intensity than I have ever seen from him. Are his eyes glistening?

“And what are these resources I have?”

VEHICLES

Caravans have been viable communities for millennia, although it may not be until the Romani vardo that the caravan started to feel like moving houses or even moving suburbs. I wanted some of the same features of those caravans in terms of mobility, but also needed to move a lot of particular resources that the Romani would not recognize. This took a notable collection of very modern and mostly common vehicles. First we needed a modern version of a horse.

Freightliners are a brand of heavy-duty trucks with horsepower reaching the high hundreds. Torque is well over a thousand poundfeet. So these are very big horses. I tried out several different brands, but was most comfortable with the layout of Cascadias (a semi-tractor) and simply went with that comfort. Ideally any of the vehicles we accumulated would be easily swapped with either the same brand or some different brand. So the most important aspect was committing to the tractor-trailer vehicle structure combined with forty-foot containers on chasses. These cargo transportation components are incredibly flexible and incredibly powerful.

Box trucks are more agile than eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers, so we acquired a dozen of them for more flexibility in route, destination,

parking, and cargo organization. These box trucks are meant to augment the Cascadias: transport less, but more control where to offload it. Both Freightliner and Ford make good versions of this kind of truck, so we had an equal mix of each.

Our modern vardo is composed of travel and fifth-wheel trailers. Travel trailers connect via a hitch on the rear bumper that is a common site on pickup trucks and some SUVs. Fifth-wheel trailers attach the same way an eighteen wheeler attaches: with a kingpin protruding down from the front of the trailer and attaching to its mate above the real wheels. For a pickup truck, this means it rests in the bed of the trailer. Fifth-wheels trailers are more stable than travel trailers but their layout is affected by the overhang section and they require that special heavyduty hitch. There are a lot of variations among trailers to fit different needs.

Living Vehicles (LVs) are a brand of travel trailer which feature a spacious layout, exceptional solar power capabilities, and weigh almost ten tons. The LVs spacious layout and solar power enabled creating the first mobile dialysis cave, and we continued to use them for that purpose. Although it is a travel trailer, the weight of the LV makes it not the type of trailer you can pull with either an SUV or even a halfton pickup truck (anything with a ‘1’ in its name). To pull the LVs, we committed to Ford F450s, which can handle the mass and also be a plausible substitute for the Freightliners in an emergency.

Forest River Sandpipers (pipers) are fifth-wheelers with better bathroom and sleeping facilities. Our goal is to have a viable community that can be moved from location to location. This requires enough people and vampires to sustain and defend our misfit caravan, and the resources to support all those people. We didn’t want a halftime (or intermission) backlog to form at any point during the day, and bathrooms can be a major bottleneck. The pipers solve the bathroom problem along with providing a large number of bunks for sleeping.

All together these vehicles could move a large and varied set of equipment, structures, and facilities. Another of the essential pillars to our success was in place the day we received the last Freightliner and LV.