Last week I told you how I became hooked on becoming a grey nomad…how a Prime Minister helped me to decide that my husbands wish to hit the road was a good one. This week we will find out how hard it is to decide on a caravan.
I am a big picture person. I believe that details tend to stifle progress and that any details that do need attention can be handled when they get round to presenting themselves. So in deciding that we wanted to sell everything we owned, leave our close and much loved family and hit the road, we had basically only two things to decide on. Could we afford it, and what sort of caravan did we need.
We found ourselves a financial genius and discovered what to do to live well and make rather than lose money. The genius came back after a week with our future mapped out and we relaxed and forgot about this aspect of our adventure until our house was sold, at which point we would hand over the money and he would make it happen.
Mind you, it took us ten months.
My husband is the opposite of me. He is a thoughtful man. He is a researcher to his bootstraps. Much of the time he would rather research than “do” and we had lived half a lifetime with him piled on the far end of the couch, lost in the world of the web looking at stuff he liked whilst I was out actually doing it. Therefore it was with trepidation that I realised he had crept on to the couch and had entered the ether to look at second hand caravans. We had budgeted for second hand, as we are not rolling wealthy.
A Caravan is defined, as a trailer towed behind a road vehicle to provide a place to sleep that is more comfortable and protective than a tent…
Now kept to those parameters it doesn’t look like a big deal, but believe me, left to their own devices researchers would build it into one, giving themselves the excuse to keep researching on and on…
For maybe two months he sat on the couch in relative silence, which was broken from time to time by a disdainful snort or an appreciative ahh. He knew every wheeled home on the market in every state in Australia. He really knew what we needed in a van and how much it would be worth, but we hadn’t seen a single solitary real one. He knew we wanted to duplicate every convenience we were used to… Air con, big fridge, hot water that works off electricity, battery or gas, surround sound and flat screen TV, ensuite bathroom and toilet, hot water with mixer taps, oh, and good towing ability, semi off road capability…the more he looked the longer the list grew. I was concerned that once again reality was giving way to virtuality. Would we soon be looking at maid’s quarters and a second storey?
I would sometimes bump into him, unexpectedly upright and pacing the corridors. “Are you ok?” I’d ask, concerned that this unaccustomed exercise would be too much. “How many beds would be adequate for two people?” he’d beg, his haunted eyes searching my face. ” I don’t know if a metal frame would be too heavy”, or, “Should we have a rear kitchen with front bedroom, a front kitchen with a rear bedroom or a middle kitchen and I don’t know where the beds fit in to those…” He’d trail off and drift away, his plaintive worries wafting back along the hall…” There are over 31 manufacturers listed on the website… I’m whittling them down…” ‘My God we’ll be here another 30 years whittling’ I thought with the dread building.
“Don’t worry about it,” I’d say strongly, “We’ll know it when we see it”. But here’s the rub… To see it we’d have to leave the house. He never got back with a reply. Reality was maybe too much to bear.
Then one day for no reason other than to kill a few hours, we took the next big step quite by accident when we dropped in to a real, live caravan dealer to see what a caravan was like to actually touch.
We walked onto the lot and looked at two vans. Armed with his exhaustive research he pointed out the pros and cons of each van… Rolled around on the ground underneath them and at that point the universe gave us a gift, a brand new demo van at a second hand price. This was obviously meant to be because it had aluminium frames and was both strong and light. You could see his tension relax… He was freed from his couch!
The van was built in December 2010 and this was January 2011… It was barely one month old but they only wanted vans on the lot that had 2011 compliance plates… That was all that was wrong with it and guess what? We had put a deposit on it and we were home with our heads spinning before we knew what we’d done! This made it all real. It actually had everything on his list bar the maid’s quarters. Now we didn’t dare to think about what we would do next because we were too scared.
We phoned the Financial Genius, advised him for the sake of his calculations that we were $50k shorter of funds than we were before. He adjusted his plan and we left it at that.
The next thing was to sell everything we owned…
Have you bought a caravan or motorhome before? How did you make your choice? What would you recommend to new nomads?