ABOUT US
Camper Van for Lifers
We believe in the ‘work hard, play harder’ mantra. When not skiing Taos & Santa Fe ski areas, paddling the Rio Grande & Chama rivers, or exploring New Mexico and its surroundings, we love nothing more than discovering the country on boating, skiing, photography, volunteering & adventure road-trip expeditions.
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We were introduced to the #VanLife upon growing tired of the challenges of truck camping with a young child. Our first van allowed us to keep all our gear in one place, hit the road on a Friday with all our boating, skiing, climbing or biking gear already van rigged and ready- packing nothing more than our weekend clothes and get as much time being weekend warriors as possible.
To find our first van, ‘Loretta Jo,' a high roof 4x4 diesel Mercedes Sprinter, (which was not at all the van we thought we wanted or could afford when we started the process of van searching,) we literally did hundreds of hours of exhaustive research evaluating the pros & cons for every make, model, build option and feature available. We embarked on this project thinking there was lots to learn, and it soon became apparent that there was far more complexity to the search than we had imagined. Van builds are complicated and require components and additions in a certain order. Each and every component added or taken away has a domino effect on what can and can't be done later. Multiple spreadsheets, and countless hours of research, budgeting, and phone calls later, we realized just how much knowledge we had accumulated and how fun it could be to share with others.
Can you say OCD? The process took us down innumerable research rabbit holes finding out many build options needed to be added in a specific order, only in specific combinations, or they could not realistically be done at all, some features were truly impossible, and some build ideas we had were incredibly ignorant or ridiculously costly. We checked countless websites impulsively on the hour and still many vans sold out from underneath us. Insurance was a web of frustration, dealership sales people almost tricked us a few times with their deceitful practices and most of their tactics had to be researched as well. Those same horrible salespeople got our phone numbers and called and texted us us day and night non-stop for months.
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The seemingly endless process process made us cry out over and over again for someone to help take on the nightmare for us! There are plenty of car buying brokers out there, why wasn't there a van broker that could have helped save us all the precious time and money we invested and led us far more quickly to the van we wanted? Hence, TheVanGurus was born.
Our Van, and more to the point, the lifestyle it makes possible, has given us so much happiness that we want to share our experience and knowledge with others in the hopes that it will provide the same. ​​Let us lend our passion and experience to your family in the search for the perfect van!
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