Here’s How You Overland In A Nissan Frontier And Almost Ruin Dinner
Late this summer friends at Nissan and Overland Expo reached out with a fun opportunity. The incredibly capable demonstrator truck they’d build would be in Michigan for a few months: would I want to take it over a weekend for… something?
This would’ve been an easy “yes” even if I was a single dude, but as the father of two boys, 5- and 7-years-old, who’d never really been camping before, I jumped at the chance.
Honestly, the kids would’ve been stoked to just sleep in the rooftop tent in our driveway if I’d told them that was the plan. But of course, I had more, eh, journalism to do to validate the loan. So, I booked a campsite on Lake Michigan near North Muskegon (a convenient 3-hour drive from my house and about 30 minutes from my Mom’s place), stocked the cooler, gave myself about 30 minutes to familiarize myself with the gear, and buckled the boys in the back.
Camping Ho!
The 2026 Overland Expo Ultimate Build is a Nissan Frontier PRO-4X that was thoroughly built for life off the pavement. And was wildly overspec’d for my little overnight with the kiddos.
Built by All Dogs Offroad and outfitted with a Tune M1L camper, it has just about everything you could want for a few days off-grid, just about anywhere in the world.
There’s an auxiliary battery and solar setup, a TRAVOCA fridge/freezer, onboard water, a heating and hot-water system, a rooftop sleeping platform, and a 270-degree awning. For more ambitious adventures than ours, the already capable Nissan PRO-4X has been augmented with an upgraded suspension, a winch, recovery gear, and an onboard air compressor.
The kitchen setup includes a Jetboil Genesis cooking system, while a portable Breeo fire pit promises the sort of campfire experience that no overland trip should be without.
It’s an impressive collection of gear, engineered to work together in a surprisingly compact package. Naturally, I took it to a state park with two little kids and immediately struggled to light a fire.
Know Your Gear
You underestimate how many systems are in place that make getting dinner ready for two little kids – both hyped up from a day at the lake and hungry as heck – easy and quick.
When I was planning dinner at the grocery store I figured I’d like the kids cook hotdogs on skewers over the fire while I cooked some chicken on the Jetboil grill that I was excited to try out. Those, with some fruit, chips, and s’mores for desert were certainly in my reach from a cooking standpoint (I cook all the time at home).
But on site things started to go badly right away. The boys were running around grabbing stuff out of the cooler, dropping plates and utensils on the ground, and asking a lot of questions about when the fire would be going. I also, as is often the case when camping, left the setup too late in the evening.
So bad choice number one was assuming that I didn’t need to build a fire correctly. The firewood we’d picked up at the corner store on the way into the park was cut thin and very dry, so I built a little nest of scrap paper under three of the pieces and assumed it would catch. It did not.
Before I figured out my mistake with the fire, I got out the grill and the bottle of propane to set up on the picnic table. I opened it and thought the connector for the propane was missing (turns out this is cleverly stored in the lid of the all-in-one carrying case).
I walked back to the truck to see if this was covered in the gear documentation and stubbed my toe on a chunk of discarded wood so badly that I immediately started bleeding profusely. The kids told me almost simultaneously, “Dad your shoe is full of blood,” and “The fire went out!”
Bear Grylls I am not.
Camping MVP: The First Aid Kit
Turns out the most critical gear in the Overland Expo Ultimate Build, at least for the next 15 minutes, was the well stocked first aid kit that hung from the back of the front headrest.
With my toe cleaned up and less leaky, I asked the boys to find some small sticks from around the packed campground. We rebuilt the fire the right way, cooked a pack of hotdogs (my 5-year-old ate the first one when it was just barely warmed up), and feasted on them with chips, juice, and plain marshmallows. As I could’ve predicted: neither kid actually wanted a smore more than just marshmallows cold from the bag.
After dinner we cleaned up, got into our sleeping bags after buttoning up the truck – the only awkward part of that whole process was shutting the tailgate from the inside, I must have missed a pull somewhere?
We took turns telling each other scary stories in the dimming evening in between a million trips to the bathroom and a million more questions about bugs, the woods, sand dunes, and hurricanes (the kids have fertile imaginations). Bloody toe and all, it was pretty much perfect.
If we did it all again, and I’d love to, spending a couple of hours learning the gear (or asking my wife to come along) would certainly make things smoother.
Worth The Trouble
Despite my flailing around with camping equipment, the trip was a triumph. We got a perfect day at the lake, a fun and low-stakes night in the woods, a visit with Mimi (my Mom), and a lot of time in the truck with just the boys.
I grew up with my Dad and my brother, and we drove everywhere we ever went on vacation, so I have a special place in my heart for hours spent behind the wheel with the kids in the back, just driving. Bringing Mom would certainly net a more organized trip, but this is one I’ll treasure despite the chaos.
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