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"I called Web Editor Alex Keirstein on a Tuesday.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just so awesome.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Are you inside the van right now?&amp;quot; It must have been the echo that gave it away. I spent a solid hour crawling around inside of the 2014 Ram Promaster after it arrived at the house. I was in love. The big, gangly European utility van is properly weird. It&amp;#039;s ugly. It sacrifices everything at the altar of functionality. I wanted to use the shit out of it.   The plan was to load up my old Kawasaki, deliver it to its new owner in Charlottesville, Virginia, camp out at a KOA, proceed to Harrisonburg, pick up an old transmission and transfer case, and then travel to Bowling Green, Kentucky, for delivery of the R&amp;amp;amp;T long-term Corvette Stingray.  This all hinged on actually getting the GPz into the van&amp;#039;s cargo bay. The Promaster has a rear deck that sits just below knee height. That&amp;#039;s low enough to fool you into thinking you can execute a stunt involving equal parts scrap lumber and testosterone to get the bike inside. After contemplating what the look on my wife&amp;#039;s face would be if she found me pinned under 500 lbs of &amp;#039;80s motorcycle, I bought a set of ramps instead. This must be what maturity feels like.  Of course, nothing cools the warm glow of personal growth quite like abject terror. Having never idled a bike up a set of ramps before, that&amp;#039;s exactly what I was left with. It&amp;#039;s kind of like walking a tightrope with a cow, if the cow has narcolepsy and only two legs. But ingress went as smoothly as can be expected, and the smattering of tie-downs inside made securing the bike easy enough. LEARN: The hidden danger of motorcycling   I have made the hike up I-81 an uncountable number of times. With family split between Virginia and Tennessee, it&amp;#039;s a well-worn route. This was something new. By the time I hit Bristol, quick winds whipped snow and the Promaster across the road. With the same graceful profile as Soviet-era block housing, the big van is a rolling sail.  That&amp;#039;s a shame. Otherwise, it&amp;#039;s a perfectly civil monstrosity. The ride&amp;#039;s comfortable, there&amp;#039;s a foolish amount of power, and the tall ride height means you have the kind of view that would give most con towers performance anxiety.  Not that I was in a rush getting to Charlottesville. As I climbed in elevation, the snow piled on. It accumulated on the road surface, and traffic soon traveled single file. Those brave enough to risk the left lane wound up in the median.   The Promaster&amp;#039;s front-wheel-drive. It&amp;#039;s also a unibody. If that seems like blasphemy in a land dominated by body-on-frame, rear-wheel-drive pickups, the configuration was a saintly blessing when I finally pulled into the KOA some eight hours later. After dropping off the GPz, I found the campground covered in a blanket of snow and ice. The van simply pulled itself through the slush to my campsite without any drama.  When I made my reservations two days earlier, the weather was sweet and warm with the promise of spring. I could think of nothing better than building a fire and relaxing with something warm to drink before retiring to the relative comfort of the van. Tents? Hotel rooms? Who needs them? They&amp;#039;re for people who don&amp;#039;t have Promasters at their disposal. I was going to camp out of the van. I brought a hatchet expressly for this purpose.  This sounds a whole lot more appealing when it&amp;#039;s not 3:00 am and 24 degrees outside. At that point, all you want is a warm place to sleep, and the back of an uninsulated cargo van ever so narrowly misses that description. READ ABOUT: Bowman&amp;#039;s Super Bowl blizzard trip   Zero-degree sleeping bags can either protect you from hypothermia or asphyxiation. Managing both is a struggle. You either leave your face exposed to the ambient temperature of a meat locker or attempt to suffocate yourself with a giant purple synthetic sack. I can read the obituary now. &amp;quot;He died as he lived.&amp;quot;  Stumbling from the van four restless hours later, the Promaster looked strangely serene parked in the frozen Virginia hills. Don&amp;#039;t get me wrong: This is the ugliest thing on the road. I&amp;#039;m told the Fiat Ducato, on which the Promaster is based, is more hideous. I haven&amp;#039;t worked up the courage for an image search. The snub nose, peaked headlights, and near vertical windshield gives the van all the elegance of a cat with its ears taped to its tail. Sure, the chicken lights on the top of the cab help, but so do darkness and partial blindness.  Show this thing to anyone with taste, and you&amp;#039;ll endure a small tidal swell of ridicule. That is, until you open the back. An hour north, in Harrisonburg, I stopped by Scout Co. to grab a transmission and transfer case for a buddy. Getting the lumps of cast iron in the back was as simple as throwing the barn doors wide and letting the forklift do the work. The opening&amp;#039;s so huge that you don&amp;#039;t have to sweat banging cargo off a doorjamb or the roof.   Technically, the Promaster 1500 has a 3922-lb payload capacity. That&amp;#039;s over 800 lbs more than the most capable Ford F-150 on sale right now. I&amp;#039;m not just picking on Ford. The Promaster can also out-haul the Ram 1500 and Chevrolet Silverado by embarrassingly large margins. For perspective, you could cut up an entire Honda Accord, including the well-fed family inside, stack the bits in the back of this van, and still be under capacity.  When I was a kid, my father told me a story about a couple of guys in a Volkswagen Type 2. They&amp;#039;d picked up a spare engine at a junkyard, plopped it in the back, and proceeded about their merry way. Except the engine wasn&amp;#039;t strapped down. When they came around a particularly notorious corner, the lump shifted, and the van flipped. Imagine being tossed into a Maytag on tumble dry with a flat-four flopping around beside you. There wasn&amp;#039;t much left for the caskets.  I headed for Kentucky with the gearboxes all but bonded to the Promaster&amp;#039;s floor. It&amp;#039;s a pretty drive over I-64. The road tumbles up through the Appalachians of Virginia and West Virginia before spilling out onto the foothills of Eastern Kentucky. It&amp;#039;s the kind of drive that makes you glad to sit a little higher. The views over the concrete bridges and into the valleys below are some of the best in the country. ENJOY: A 410-mile, 7-hour joyride in the BMW 4 Series   I arrived in Bowling Green wearing the distinct perfume of a man who had spent entirely too much time in a confined space with an ancient and open transmission. I&amp;#039;m told it was not potent enough to mask the stink of jealousy I wore while watching Associate Editor David Gluckman drive off with our new long-term Corvette Stingray.  By the time I returned home Thursday evening, I had covered close to 1400 miles. That&amp;#039;s typically enough to make me park a machine for good. But with the transmission and transfer case unloaded, I was once again left with a big, empty space. It continued to echo with possibility.  I spent Saturday and Sunday driving around wrangling other bikes: a free &amp;#039;71 Suzuki TS90R Honcho for me, a low-buck &amp;#039;86 Honda XL600R for a buddy&amp;#039;s first machine, and even the 2013 Honda CRF250L that got me into dual sports. They all found their way into the back of the Promaster at one point or another. Find: The Antidote   The best cars are vessels\u2014not just for people and things, but for potential. They carry you places you wouldn&amp;#039;t have gone otherwise, open chapters that would have remained blank in their absence. It turns out that&amp;#039;s true for vans, too. You feel it when you see that vast, empty cargo bay for the first time. It&amp;#039;s an enabler. You&amp;#039;re compelled to do things, to accomplish tasks you have not yet discovered, even if that task is freezing your balls off in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/features/a7639/clifford-the-big-red-promaster/>