Movers and Makers: Lynn Hanrahan

Ford is working with MAKE to profile owners of the Transit Connect, a vehicle that offers creative types a small, modifiable vehicle to suit their passions and personal pursuits. In this series, we’ll be profiling Transit Connect owners and looking at how they’ve customized their rides.

Lynn Hanrahan is a recently retired high school math teacher. That means she now has lots of time to pursue her passion: exploring the great outdoors. When thinking about a vehicle that would get her to the trailhead and provide shelter away from home, she knew she didn’t want a lumbering, fuel thirsty RV.

“They cost too much and I don’t need all that,” she says.

So she opted for a Ford Transit Connect. She modified the vehicle with a folding bed, a sink, two 12-volt fans (she just moved from North Carolina to central Florida), and lots of storage for camping, fishing, paddling, and biking gear. She also carries a power pack under the the front passenger seat in case she draws too much from the vehicle’s battery, but that hasn’t happened yet. Robert Morehead of Morehead Design Lab helped her with the modifications.

“It fits my minimalist attitude,” she says. “It’s just going to be me and my two dogs.”

When I spoke to her she was gearing up for a month-long trip to various national forests like Pisgah in North Carolina and Sam Houston in Texas. She wanted to test how it felt to live in the redesigned vehicle, but mainly she wanted to see how her dogs (a black mouth cur and a tzi tzu) would handle life on the road.

From the looks of the modified Transit Connect, it looks like they’ll be traveling in comfort.

“I can go just about anywhere I want,” said Lynn.

If you were going to modify a Transit Connect to become the ultimate travel and camping vehicle what would you do to it? What gear and accessories would you want onboard? And what ideas do you have for tricking out a Transit Connect beyond travel and camping? Please share your thoughts in the comment below.