Bill Vancos hasn’t seen the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore or the Pacific Coast Highway through the windshield of his funky 1966 Ford “Turtle Top” van.
But you get the feeling from talking to him that it’s only a matter of time.
Vancos, a resident of Rhinelander, Wis., is certainly equipped to see the country and do some old school 1960s-style camping. His Turtle Top rig has aged amazingly well and looks as ready to go today as it probably did back in ’66.
Actually, Vancos hasn’t been camping at all in his cool converted van, but he has certainly been thinking about it. “Everybody asks that!” he laughs. “We have not done that yet, but it’s funny, before I bought this, my wife, Joy, had mentioned to me that we hadn’t been camping in a long time …When I bought it I told everybody it was because Joy wanted to go camping. I told everybody this was ‘Joy’s RV.’”
Vancos is definitely the right kind of guy to own such an offbeat machine. He’s a bit of a free spirit who was hooked on old vans even before he got his camper. He also owns a very original 1963 Ford Econoline van, which eventually led to the camper. “A guy came up to me at a car show and said, ‘Would you be interested in a cousin to your van?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m always interested in toys,’ and I wound up trading another old car I had for this one.
“If you can believe it, I traded a 1981 Chevy Chevette with 13,000 miles on it! … But I had the one Econoline and I really enjoyed that, so I thought having another one would be fun, but this is a whole different perspective, with the camper thing.”
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