Every van life story starts the same way: someone watches a YouTube video, gets a wild look in their eye, and starts pricing out solar panels. Ours starts with a hotel that happened to have wheels.
The Spark
A while back, I rented a camper van from a private seller, one of the leftover fleet vans from Cabana, the Seattle startup that tried to reinvent the hotel as a “hotel on wheels.” One camping trip in that thing and I was done for. Real shower. Real fridge. A bed that didn’t require an engineering degree to deploy. I came home and couldn’t stop talking about it.
The person I couldn’t stop talking to was Dr. Andrew Pastor, friend, fellow physician, and, crucially, a man with prior van experience. Andrew once converted a Ford Transit Connect into a camper himself. Built it with his own hands. Rudimentary, but it worked, and he was proud of it.
There was just one problem: Andrew is tall, and the Transit Connect is not. He essentially built himself a very nice sleeping bag with cupholders. He eventually sold it, presumably to someone shorter. (He assures me the van was great. His spine has filed a dissenting opinion.)
So when I started talking about Cabana vans, full-size Transits, high roof, standing room for actual adults, Andrew didn’t need much convincing.
The Lead
Here’s the thing about Cabana. At its peak, the company had raised around $13 million, was running roughly 70 vans across five markets, and had hosted over 4,000 guests. These weren’t weekend DIY builds. They were professionally converted 2019 Ford Transit 250 high-roofs with solar, big battery banks, wet baths, fridges, vent fans, and pull-out outdoor kitchens, vans built to survive strangers using them as hotel rooms, which is basically a torture test on wheels.
Then, in 2024, Cabana shut down. Seventy-ish luxury camper vans hit the market at once.
Andrew found the lead the way all great financial decisions begin: on a Reddit thread. A Ford dealer up in Anacortes, Washington had ended up with a batch of the ex-Cabana fleet, about sixteen of them sitting on the lot, and, according to the internet, the dealer wanted them gone.
We looked at each other over text like two residents who just found out the cafeteria had free pizza.
The Night
We drove up after clinic. An hour north, in the dark, in January, in the snow.
If you’ve never been to a car dealership lot on a freezing winter night, I recommend it for the atmosphere alone. Pitch black except for one lot light throwing a hard glare across a row of sixteen identical white Transits, snow coming down sideways, wind off the water, and two doctors in completely inadequate jackets walking the rows with our phones out as flashlights.
We climbed in and out of vans until we couldn’t feel our fingers. Checked the conversions. Opened every drawer. Ran the vent fans. Sat in the swivel seats like we were test-driving a spaceship.
And then we asked the question that started this whole thing:
“Would you sell us two?”
Reader: he would. He would sell us two so fast.
The Deal
$38,500 per van. Each one a 2019 Transit 250 high roof with around 112,000 miles, in good condition with the honest wear and tear you’d expect from a former rental fleet.
For context, and this is my estimate, not gospel, a comparable professional conversion on a similar chassis was running roughly twice that in early 2024, once you priced out the build. Solar, batteries around 2kWh, cassette toilet, shower, fridge, vent fan, outdoor kitchen, onboard fresh and grey water. Building that from scratch isn’t just expensive; it’s a year of your weekends and at least one marriage counseling session per electrical subsystem.
Instead, we bought two of them, on the same night, from a dealer who was visibly relieved to see the herd thin out.
First thing we did was replace all the fluids on both vans, 112K miles of rental duty earns you a full spa day. Beyond that? These things were built to be abused by paying guests and came out the other side working. That’s the best product review a van conversion can get.
So Now What?
Now there are two doctors in the Seattle area with two matching white high-roof Transits, and every parking lot we share looks like a very small, very confused medical convention.
This blog is where we document what comes next: the trips, the fixes, the mistakes (there will be mistakes, we’re doctors, not electricians, and one of us already built a van he couldn’t stand up in). We do budget-conscious DIY, honest reviews with no affiliate-link cheerleading, and a strict policy of admitting when we broke something ourselves.
Coming up next: the mistakes we’ve already made, a full build tour with a real cost breakdown, and our favorite Pacific Northwest spots that we’ll share right up until they get crowded, at which point we’ll deny everything.
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, JB & Andrew, Van of Brothers