Testing the iKamper 3.0 Mini | Land Rover Do-Over Land

Hi everybody, welcome to another update of the Land Rover do-over land. You can see that the Land Rover looks very different than it did in the last episode. I've got a lot to tell you about and show you, but first what I need to do is get my camp set up. I'm out here in the White Mountains in eastern Arizona. It's just really beautiful here, but let me get this set up and then I'll show you what I've done to the rig and bring you up to speed. Okay now that the tent is all set up, let me show you around the rig and show you some of the improvements I've made and things that I think is going to make a huge difference when I take this down to Ushuaia. I'm sorry the sun is being finicky today, so I've reversed my camera here so you can actually see me. But let me tell you about some of the basic things I've done to the rig. I didn't do much, but what I did is a significant improvement. Remember my goal is to make this an expedition vehicle, not necessarily an overlanding vehicle. I want to be able to go through South America. I want to be able to go into the Amazon Basin and through the jungle and some mud and ruts. I want to be able to do recovery with nobody else there. I need to do some things and I need to be able to pull off on the side of the road, throw up my tent, camp and then take everything down and just keep going. So this rig is built specifically for South America and to go to Ushuaia. That is my goal, to take this down to the farthest point in South America. So what I've done is the first thing I put a front runner rack on here that allows me to mount things on the top of the Land Rover. The day has finally arrived, my front runner roof rack is here. Keith is helping me out. You met him in the last video and we're getting everything set up so that on Tuesday, about three days from now, my iCamper iCamper Sky Camp Mini 3.0 is showing up. So we'll be all ready to go. I'm super excited because finally the Land Rover build is starting to have some some character to it. So everything has been underneath the hood and in the suspension stuff you can't see. But finally now it's looking like an off-road vehicle and so we're gonna get this installed and then next will be the iCamper and then I'll show you how everything looks. The biggest thing obviously is the iCamper Mini 3.0 that rooftop tent is spectacular. So I've been camping out for the last three four nights here I guess in the White Mountains in Arizona, trying that out. It's been really windy, it's been super rainy, like it was so rainy and stormy and lots of lightning and I didn't, I wasn't able to capture any of that on video, but the iCamper was a champ. No noise, it didn't blow over, nothing. It was just rock solid. I'm loving that and then I also added some storage. I have a Pelican case on the back of the rack and then I just held that down with some stratches. Those are little straps from Front Runner. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of water and so I added this. This is a 20 liter Front Runner water tank and mounting bracket and it's worked really, really well. It's got this little faucet right here that you just turn on and off so that gives you water when you need it and then it just all disassembles from the top and so that is enough for about two and a half days, three days if you're, if you spread that out and so for me I'm not planning on going off-grid and just staying out in the woods for a week or two at a time and so that is plenty for me. That's enough water for me to wash dishes or have drinking water or do whatever I need to do and I can refill that along the way. It meets my goals and if I find out on my shakedown trips, that's what I'm doing right now, if I find out it's just not enough water I can also add a second unit. Now there is a 40 liter tank. I didn't get that specifically because I didn't want to have to lift that up on the roof all the time and I just wanted something small and maybe even leave some room for some extra storage up there and so that's what I've done. So the second thing I'm doing here is I'm testing out all of this stuff. I want to camp out, I want to see if my cooking gear, all that stuff is up to snuff. Pretty much the same thing I did in the last shakedown trip except I'm all by myself this time doing this solo. What I have learned is that it is really cold up here in the White Mountains right now. Last night it was about 40 degrees and so I am not planning on camping in South America where it gets down to 40 degrees but if I do I am not prepared. It was uncomfortably cold and so I need to get some extra blankets or electric blankets or heater of some sort because it was just unbearably uncomfortable. I couldn't sleep at all. So this is in my mind a warm weather rig. It is not suited for cold weather. 40 is about as low as I think I could stand but that's what I'm doing. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to camp out and share the experience as I explore the White Mountains. I absolutely love the White Mountains. I was really enjoying zipping down the fire roads and exploring and seeing what I could find but my favorite spot was definitely the Black River. It's just west of Alpine Arizona. It's in a gorge. It runs for 10 or 15 miles and it's just stunning. If it wasn't so darn cold I definitely would have stayed a few more days. Now at the Mogollon Rim it was really really really cold and the White Mountains it was rainy and so the weather said that it was going to get even colder and I just am not a cold weather person so I decided to come up here. This is just outside of Payson Arizona. It is beautiful. I'm camped right on the rim. I'll just show you how close I am to the edge. So here's my camp. If we go right over here you can see there's a little trail. That's it. That is the cliff. That's the edge and so I don't want much farther than this but that is the rim. The only drawback is you can hear in the background maybe the Forest Service is clearing out dead trees, trees with disease and stuff and so they've been chopping trees and doing a lot of stuff so it's a little bit noisy today but that'll all go away tonight. What I'm going to do here is camp where it's a little bit warmer. It is supposed to get really rainy and a little bit stormy over the next few days beginning tomorrow evening and so I will probably plot a course south and so we'll just have to see what happens but for now I love this setup. This is a great camping spot and so I'm just going to relax and enjoy the day. One of the biggest differences between this shakedown drive and the previous shakedown drive is this. This is a Blue Yeti. This gives me about triple the capacity that I had in the first shakedown drive. This is on loan from my friend Keith Kessler of Adventure Off-Grid. This is a Blue Yeti. I think it's an EB-70S. I'll make sure I put the model number and all the stuff in the description of this video but this is about 700 watt-hours of juice and it allows me to power my laptop, my drone. This has a USB-C power port. It has normal USB power ports and then normal you know plug-in stuff so anything I need to charge my drone, my laptop, my lights, anything like that I can do that off of this. The other thing that's really cool is you can see this cable coming in here. I also have a 100 watt solar panel and so because the MacBook Pro is about 70 watts in bright sunlight in the daytime I can have the solar panel out there charging this and then this will be charging my laptop and then this doesn't lose any capacity at all. So I can theoretically edit all day long on my laptop and then at night when the Sun goes down I still have juice here. The other thing is this cable that I have here is really long so if the Sun is not where I am I can move the solar panel around and it works just fine. Well it's nighttime. I'm in my tent. This is the iCamper Mini 3.0. This has been really cold in here in the White Mountains. It got down to about 40-39 degrees and I was really just uncomfortably, miserably cold and so this sleeping bag I've had for a while. This is one of my, probably the favorite, my favorite sleeping bag I've ever had. This is a Nemo and it is a Ramsey. It is rated for 15 degrees Fahrenheit so this should keep me plenty warm at night. In fact I've had this in places that have been in the teens and I've been just fine. So I think what's happened is because I use this primarily on my motorcycle, it's been compressed so many times that the fibers inside have been smashed together. So what you need to do is condition a sleeping bag like this. Normally what I do is I put this in a big tumble dryer at a laundromat with my shoes with zero heat, just air fluff and let this tumble around and those fibers and stuff will break apart and expand and fill in the all the pockets here and that will give you better insulation. So since I don't have a tumble dryer what I did today is I just did this for about an hour or so just trying to get all the fibers and stuff to decompress so that I have more insulation and hopefully more warmth. And so that's what needs to happen when you have a bag that hasn't been conditioned. And I can even look at this and I can see right through it and see the clumps of feathers and stuff. So it needs to be smooshed out. So it's a big experiment. Tonight I will sleep in my recently ruffled bag and I'll let you know if it worked. Hopefully I'll be toasty warm tonight and not have an uncomfortable sleepless night like I had in the past. Well the time now is 548 a.m. The good news is my sleeping bag worked just fine last night. It was nice and toasty warm so that's great. The bad news is there is and the weather it was predicted to start raining at about 10 in the morning today but it actually started raining about 2 a.m. and it's we're in a little lull right now. But the weather map shows that it's going to stop raining in about 25 minutes for about 25 minutes and then it's rain for the next three days. Rain storms, lightning, all that kind of stuff. So because I'm up here on this mountaintop it's really a bad place to be camping during rainstorms especially with lightning and stuff like that. So in about 10 minutes as soon as it hopefully stops raining I have to get all my stuff out of this tent, close it up and then get out of here and find a place that's a little safer to stay. So it's predicted to rain in most of Arizona for the next three days so I have to figure out exactly where I'm going to be able to stay. Well it has really started raining hard. It was supposed to be stopping but I'm in a rainstorm. Oh maybe, maybe that was the last hurrah. I don't know. I gotta get out of here. I'm covered in water. This tent is gonna be soggy. Well the tent is down it is very wet. There's a break in the rain for about five minutes and then it just started raining again. I got pretty drenched. So hopefully I'll be able to find a dry place where I can open the tent and let it air out so it doesn't get all moldy and stuff. Whoo nice thing is it's warm. Cloud is keeping it nice and and toasty here but I gotta get out of here before it starts raining in earnest. Well it's just starting to rain now so it looks like I hit the window perfectly to get the tent down. So it's just a light rain but yeah here it comes. Time to get out of here because it's gonna get nasty really really quickly. Well the good thing is it has stopped raining. I am in the Coronado National Forest making some lunch here, some soup and what I've decided to do is just hang out here for the next three days. It is normally pretty hot here but because it's been rainy here, it's gonna be rain today, rain yesterday, it's gonna rain tomorrow. The temperatures max out at about 80 degrees, 75-80 degrees and at night it only drops down to about 65 so it's perfect and so today when it starts raining I'll plug in my laptop and I'll start editing this video. I know I need to get something out and so I'll do that and so this is the end of this part of the journey. Next up I don't know, we'll see. I'm thinking of maybe going down to Mexico and camping on the beach or I might be going somewhere else. You'll have to join me in the next video to see what happens. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. If you want more of this content make sure you subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't miss any notifications and if this is your thing you might want to consider joining my support community. It does take quite a bit of money to do this kind of stuff and I'd love one day to not have to eat soup out of a can and so I can't afford that. So that support community it's not just for grins it's actually I use that to help pay for gas and insurance and food and that kind of stuff. So if this is your thing I encourage you to check that out and perhaps join the community. Well thanks very much I will see you again very very soon.