Fourwheelcamper Wildcat
- David Wenzel
- May 25, 2024
- 4 min read
We spent a long time searching for the perfect cabin for us.
In the end, it was a wonderful coincidence!
The cabin is the heart of your entire setup, your apartment, your house if you like. It's your retreat in bad weather and cold. For many long-distance travelers, the vehicle and the cabin are often the only things they own. That's why it was so important for us to find the best cabin for our needs! Everyone has different preferences and needs, and that's what makes this journey so exciting! For everyone, different criteria may be important when choosing a suitable cabin. Last but not least, the financial outlay is of course also a very decisive factor.
Once we had decided on our vehicle, we had to decide on a type of cabin. There is now a large selection of available cabins, and we couldn't wait to explore them all! Which one suits us? What is important to us, and what is not?
What does the cabin absolutely have to offer and what is not so important to us?
At the end of the day, a cabin that has to fit on a small pick-up is always a compromise. The available space is extremely limited, but it's a challenge we were excited to take on! We knew we had to lower our expectations, but we were determined to find a cabin that offered a minimum of space.
As a roof tent was out of the question, we quickly moved on to find a better solution. We were looking for something in which we could also stay “inside”. Where you can close the door behind you in bad weather and cold conditions. With heating and a minimum of freedom of movement. But the existing offers on the market look rather poor. In addition, the cabin had to be removable and the whole vehicle had to fit into a sea container for shipping.
After endless research, a few trade fair visits, and lots of YouTube videos, a video from GrizzlyNbear was suggested to us one day.
We were so excited to watch it! Their videos changed everything...
Steph and Leigh have been traveling for many years with their 130 Defender and their Fourwheelcamper cabin Grizzly. They've been all the way across Europe and Asia to Australia! And they’re currently traveling in southern Africa! Absolutely worth seeing! We've watched all their videos, and it was clear that this was the right cabin for us and our vehicle.
A pop-up cabin from Fourwhellcampers has so many incredible advantages that you simply won't find better on the market. The space in this cabin is incredible, the fold-down roof also makes it incredibly compact and the aluminium construction makes it very light, but at the same time robust. It's been on the market in the USA for 50 years and is very successful!
We dropped our cabin off here for the first time after picking it up from the dealer.
Dropping it off is quick and easy! It takes the longest to attach the legs. Then slowly drive out from under the cabin and lower the cabin again, done.
As you can imagine, to reload it is not quite as quick, but it's still quick and easy!
If you're doing it for the first time, especially, it can take quite a long time. It's important to be careful and not break anything, but once you've done it a few times, it goes pretty fast – in about 20 or 30 minutes, the cabin is back on the car!
We bought our cabin at Wohnkabinencenter in Gevelsberg Germany.
This is where people from all over Europe come together in their search for the perfect drop-off cabin! Our cabin is a so-called Slide Inn cabin, which means that you drive the vehicle under the cabin to load it. And if you’re looking for something a little bit different, they also have so-called UTE cabins! All you need is a car with a flatbed to make this work. With the Slide Inn cabins from Fourwheelcampers, you have the amazing choice of a fully equipped and ready-to-go cabin or an empty cabin without furniture. We decided to go with an empty cabin. There are so many things built into the fully fitted cabin that were not important to us and that we would have removed or changed anyway.
With an empty cabin, you can make your own ideas come to life right from the start!
As we mentioned before, the empty cabin is ready for you to add your own furniture, water tank, and heating. The only standard features are a basic laid-out 12-volt system with a small 60Ah AGM battery and the option to operate a small fridge and charge a cell phone via USB or cigarette socket. The lighting inside (roof lights) and the cabling for solar are installed on the roof as standard. Our cabin has an additional Maxxfan, which is great!
Once we’d chosen our perfect cabin, the next challenge was to decide how to style it.
What do we absolutely need, and what do we not need at all?
From the very beginning, we knew we didn't want gas in the cabin.
We were delighted to discover two fantastic options for heating and electric cooking. The first was heating with diesel, which was perfect for the cold winter months, and the second was electric cooking with induction, which we knew would be a real treat.
In our next blog, we're thrilled to dive even deeper into what we chose and why.
Stay tuned!
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