Step one. The seats have to come out for me to build my camping setup. Some people leave the seats in and fold them out of the way, but it leaves a greatly reduced amount of space, and I don’t need to flex it for carrying passengers. This is purely my minivan camper, all in!

The middle seats themselves were easy to get out. They just unclip from the seat trollies. But the seat trollies are another story! They are not designed to ever come out. To fully remove one of them, track and all, you have to drop the gas tank under the van! That is definitely beyond my pay grade.

The back seats folded forward and the brackets were fairly easy to remove with a ratchet. At least one step that was easy!

If foul language leaves a mark, this van is scarred for life. I found a post on a Toyota forum describing how to remove the seat trollies and tracks for the middle seats. Would you believe the first year they built them this way was 2011? If I’d bought a van one year older the middle seats would have been out in a simple jiffy.

I finally managed to get all of the trollies out, and all but one track which I just left in the floor (the gas tank removal track, nope!). For one other track I took it over to my mechanic who put it on a lift to get to four bolts underneath. That was quick and easy and they didn’t even charge me (since they have plenty of my money already!). But the gas tank ordeal was not a freebie so that was not happening.

It am freaked out by removing all this. I have no idea what I’m doing and there is no way I’ll be able to get it back in!