Van

Our Van

Our Van is a Ford Transit, Karmann conversion, 2.5l turbo diesel, with right-hand drive. We bought her with just under 40,000 miles on the clock. We viewed vans with lower mileage for the same price (one with as little as 21,000m) but decided on the Ford because the layout was one we thought would work for us, and we liked the build quality. Apparently a lot of first time buyers exchange their van within a few months because the layout doesn’t work for them and we didn’t want to fall into that trap.

[Show as slideshow]

Extras

When you buy a van from a dealer they will most likely strip out all the extras. So, although you may view the van with carpets, alarms etc built in, don’t be surprised when you actually get the van that none of those bits have been included in the sale.

So far, we have bought the following extras for our van:

• patio mat (goes under the awning)
• motion sensitive alarms
• alarms for the windows
• water hose (get a food grade one with anti-kink technology)
• tap adaptors to connect our hose to the variety of different tap sizes in Europe
• electric hookup cable (and an adapter for European plugs)
• hooks, hooks and more hooks
• mini safe (to keep our passports in)
• ramps to get the van level on a slope
• big blind spot mirrors for the wing mirrors
• a solar panel to keep our secondary battery topped up
• bike cover for our bikes when racked at the back
• wind break (kindly donated by Bill and Jayne)

Driving

We’ve found driving a right-hand drive in Europe surprisingly easy. I attribute this partly to the fact that when driving a motorhome you go relatively slowly, and partly to us having had experience driving on the right in the past. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who’s never driven in Europe before.

Resources

Being new to motor-homing we have had to learn as we go along the amount of resources the van consumes. The water tank takes 100 litres which is about enough for us to free-camp for three days if we’re careful not to waste anything. We get about 8km / litre from the engine on standard roads, which drops to 6km / litre when it gets hilly. We have two batteries, combined together give us enough power for 2-3 days when using our laptops and other electrical equipment. If you are wild or free camping, a cigarette lighter adaptor for standard UK plugs will prove invaluable, it allows us to charge laptops, mobile phones, cameras etc in the van. Chris even tried to use it to heat her mini hair tongs but discovered this extracted too much power and blew the fuse : )

Repairs

Our van came with a supposed detailed inspection and repair on “fittings, latches and catches”. We’ve since discovered that this was a very superficial inspection. We’d recommend to anyone buying a motorhome that you have some degree of DIY skill if you’re buying second-hand van (or, in our case, 8th-hand). Inspect carefully

Radio

Tapes and CDs are a thing of the past – they take up too much room and are far too easily damaged. We bought a car radio with a USB slot to plug in memory sticks. You can fit as much music as you’ll ever need, plus a bunch of useful extras such as foreign language lessons, on a memory stick. Just be careful not to mistake the memory stick for your indicator lever!

Satellite Navigation

We use a TomTom GO 750 with a subscription to their live services and map updates. We add third party point of interest data such as ACSI campsites, supermarkets, speed cameras etc.

As useful as the TomTom has been I think it will be our last purchase of that brand. We have quite often found the maps to be horribly out of date, despite our paying for quarterly updates. Spain was particularly bad from that perspective as we found the device trying to navigate us down roads that didn’t exist, or missing highways constructed a year earlier. TomTom’s live services also do not work in Spain so be warned; your monthly live subscription will be wasted while you are there. TomTom have announced that they are dropping support for third party data this year. Another annoyance is the speed; our 7 year old iPaq ran the TomTom software much faster despite having only a fraction of the processing power of the new devices!

Security

There is much debate about whether or not one should beef up the security in a motorhome. Some think that adding security devices gives the impression that there is something worth stealing in the van. Others think it’s better to add security. We belong to the second group. Our little dog acts as a guard when we’re in the shops, and when the van is left alone we use motion sensitive alarms and window alarms. Take note, though, the cheap options don’t work well and you are better off investing a little more in devices that don’t require a suitcase full of watch batteries and fall off when the wind blows too hard!

Our mini safe houses our passports and other irreplaceable valuables.