Buying a Caravan Feedback

The Rev

I would not take any caravan on the Mereenie Loop road until it is bituminised. There has been some work done of late west of Hermannsburg but overall it is not a good road especially for towing. There are moves afoot to bituminese the road but it could be politicians rhetoric.

A Treg hitch or something alike gives better manouvreability than a ball and cap hitch. It may be a trad more difficult to line up when hitching but with practise it becomes an easy thing. A reversing camera is a plus.


Cheers

Hi Rev,

Don't mean to be telling you how to suck eggs but will your wife with a back condition be able to manage getting into and out of bed in this style camper as you generally have to climb up to get into the bed areas in them.

Hope you find what you are after.

Hi The Rev

Our previous camper was a rather old wind up and fold out similar to the Jayco Dove. The new ones should wind up easier than ours did and no doubt it would be easier to slide out the beds than in ours. My husband has a bad back so i can understand Jen's reservations. Drawbacks in the camper included inconvenience of setting up and packing up each move, hard to wind up (even though we added a geared boat winch), not much room for storage, dust ingression, we had to unhitch to unfold the beds (both needed to be fully extended to access the van). The so called double beds were too small for us both the sleep comfortably, so we had one each, and the mattresses too thin for his bad back, and not enough clearance for a thick extra dense foam as we have now. It was when we were holidaying with this van that we saw our first Bushtracker and from then on for him it was a Bushtracker or nothing. Hence we had to wait until we could purchase our older model BT.

We travelled the Mereenie Loop in September and it was not too bad. We met travellers with a camper trailer (not an off road model) who had broken a spring. It took all day for them to get to King's Canyon with temporary fixes which did not last for long.

Recovery costs in the outback can be extreme, so you need to make sure your rig is up to the roads you choose, as well as looking after your lady's comfort needs.

Motherhen

Hi The Rev,

Have you thought about an Offroad Penguin? Very easy to set up you just wind it up and it has an inner spring mattress.

My wife and I had one, toured all of WA/NT and had it on some pretty rough roads. We had no problems with it.

We found it to be very comfortable and plenty of room for us. I set it up with annexes on all sides with full walls attached to the front annex.

Also we found it very airy as all the sides can be opened to let the breeze in.

REv.
Just remember the Jayco is an 'Out Back' not "Off Road".
It should handle most dirt roads without a problem if you drive to suit the conditions. i'e' Slow Down.
Unless you want to tackle the really 'Off Road" stuff then a Tregg Hitch is not required and a standard 50mm Ball Coupling or Hyland Hitch will probably be better suited and make fitting a WDH easier.
ozjohn.

Hey Rev.

Looked in to the jayco swan a couple of months ago with every intention of traveling for 12 months with the wife and 2 kids. The swan is very capable of going just about any where. All i can recomend is ask the dealer about the nomad kit for them. It offers a treg hitch, external gas bayonet, upgraded suspention and a few other goodies. Only found out about it cause the only one we could find avalible and ready to go at the time had it.

Cheers.

Thanks everyone. Jen & I have taken a lot of time to think, research and pray about everything you have all said. Today we just signed up to order a new Jayco Penguin Outback, with the fittings we want.

We both are very excited to be taking this step. This will be our new mobile home. As we live in church rectory's we don't have our own space, so this will be it, even though it is not huge, it will be ours.

We have ordered one to be built with the wiring in place for solar power to be added as we can afford it.

Once again thank you all for the great advice and you all feel like friends, even though we have never met yet, so maybe we will meet along the wallaby.

God bless

the Rev