The story of the Cam Van.

How it started...

In the middle of 2024 Cameron's parents, Chris and Sonia decided to go on a bit of a holiday together, a driving holiday, and decided on driving the Great Ocean Road down in Victoria. After some discussion about how to do it, it was decided to purchase a second hand van, with the intention of converting it into a cheap little campervan and just seeing how it all went. We both booked 3 weeks of annual leave from our respective jobs for early November, for the planned trip down to Victoria to drive the Great Ocean Road. We checked out some different vans and ended up buying a beat up second hand tradie's commercial van with 306,000Km on the clock, and here started the project. Before we took it for a 3 week adventure we had decided to use it for a long weekend in October at an annual music festival we had been attending for a few years. This would serve as a little shake down to see what worked, what didn't and what else we needed to add before heading off for 3 weeks.

When we first bought this van in August, Cam was said to be "frothin'" about converting the van, according to his mates. They even said he was excited about working on it with me, his dad. I don't know how excited he was about working on it with me but I'm pretty sure Cam would have been excited about the idea of having a converted campervan to take away when he went camping with his mates, something they did quite often. Sometimes they would end up sleeping in their cars, so this would have been a comfortable step up. The first step in the process of the conversion was stripping out all the dirty, busted and broken bits in the van. We stripped out all the flooring and broken door linings. We were starting from scratch. Next was cleaning the ceiling, getting rid of all the old glue and dirt and grease so we could install insulation and fit the ceiling paneling. We had stripped out and cleaned the interior to a level that we were all happy with, and now it was time to start fitting it out.

Working on the van was the last thing Cam and I did together. He helped me fit the roof lining, as they were long sheets of panel and needed two people to work together, one from each end. We did that together, and it was while working with Cam doing this simple project that I really became aware of how much he had learnt and grown as an apprentice 3rd year tradie, as he knew what he was doing and required no further instruction from Dad. In fact, he let me know while doing the fit-out that this is the sort of thing he did at work everyday, and I knew in that moment that he was no longer my boy who needed his dad to teach him things, he had become a man who was working on the tools and earning his wage as a tradesman.

Sadly Cam passed away before any of these dreams were realised. The van was still in the beginning stages of being fitted out at the time.

This is the story of the "Cam Van". It has become something of a legacy.