15 Oct Mexico to Costa Rica in a camper with a baby: what to take?

Stuff to take (from Holland)
While preparing for the roadtrip we would make from Mexico to Costa Rica overland in the winter of 2017, we realised we could NOT take a whole lot of stuff from Europe. We have just three (handluggage) bags. One each. There is a lot of stuff you would usually buy for a baby, that you just cannot take. We tried to minimise it to the essentials, focusing on what we really need. I decided to break it down into function: eat, sleep, sit, drive, ride, dress, protect, play. From this list of things we took, there is stuff we use every single day. Stuff we think we are going to love during this camping trip (we are not paid to write this, no affiliate links either). 

The only closet in our 1972 Volkwagen van: good luck with that! 🙂

We’d like to start with how we thought to equip the Volkswagen van for this journey. Please know we are not paid to write this post and we don’t like affiliate marketing, so no paid links here either. It is good to know that the Volkswagen van is old, small and has very little space to store stuff. We do not have a refrigerator nor solar panels (yet). For this trip the first thing we bought online was a big, water tight bag to put on the roof of the van. This bag would be used to store our winter clothes and shoes in (as we travel through a variety of climates). We simply don’t have any space inside the van to store things we need later in time.

To illustrate this, let’s show you our ‘closet‘ where all our clothes have to fit (including the baby’s…). ‘Ahum… why am I doing this again?!?‘, it’s a thought that regularly crossed my mind… While planning, we are considering to make a shipment with camping stuff, to be sent from Europe or the US to Mexico. As it is virtually impossible to find these kind of equipment in Mexico, as it has no camping culture. Things would include a sun canopy for the bus, a camping carpet, a three-point safety belt kit to install in the bus, a set of mosquito nets and sun thermo screens for the bus, a safety net for the bedbunk our daughter sleeps in. (In the end, we did not ship anything from Europe in one box, but we had FedEx deliver us some things in Mexico from webshops in France, The Netherlands and the US: in the end we bought the sun canopy, a safety belt and a mosquito net for the back and side openings of the bus, the rest we just skipped and designed solutions locally.)