Just bought and read two Haynes Manuals: Caravan Manual & Build Your Own Motorcaravan, to help me with my home built caravan project:

To be honest about the books, they could be published as one manual.  They both cover basically the same things, with slightly different focuses.  If I owned a caravan or motorhome, I’d be wanting to have both in my library.

The Caravan Manual explains how the various systems, such as lighting, power, gas, heating work and how to maintain them.  While the “Build your own Motorcaravan” book focuses more on the various options for each system covering the pros and cons of each system.

A great example would be the water pump system.  When your building your own, you can choose between having micro switches on the taps or use a pressure switch, to turn on the water pump.  From my experience of micro-switches and without any real research into the caravan industry, I’d be wanting a pressure switch, mainly because

• Micro-swtiches will need to be adjusted regularly;
• I wouldn’t be surprised if different tap manufacturers used different switches, resulting in carrying more spare;
• Each tap will need a switch, resulting in more switches and cabling, resulting in more chances of something going wrong.

Now the pressure switch does have a weakness:  If there is a small, hard to find leak, then you could be woken up at some strange hour of the night with the water pump starting up.

It didn’t take long to start to realise that when a caravan company describes a caravan as “lightweight”, what it really means is either “basic” or “tiny” and it has very little to do with the actual gross weight.  Now I did find some very interesting designs, including the classic teardrop vans and plenty of industrial design student’s futuristic design, but nothing that was light enough for our car to tow and large enough to live in.

One Australian design that really took our fancy was the Jayco Expanda Caravan.  It was small, but once parked, two double bed pop out both ends, similar to pop-up camper caravans.  Only problem was that Jayco is an Australian company and we needed something here in Europe Read more »

So the decision was made, a caravan it is.  Now what size do we need and what options are out there?  We spent about a week checking out a few classified websites, to get an idea of size, layout and costs.  We even took a trip to a couple of nearby caravan yards, complete with tape measure and notepad in hand.  I think the salesmen though we were mad!

Our goal was to find a small 4 berth caravan and live mainly in the annex.  We figured a 16-18 foot van could do the job, small enough to make for easy towing, but large enough for 4 beds.  It wasn’t until we looked a bit deeper that we suddenly hit a brick wall. Read more »

After about 2 weeks of furious websurfing, looking at various places to live, we had an idea: Why not try them all?  Annette had been reading several blogs from families who are on the road long term.  After some more brain storming, the concept of  “slow travel” floated to the top of our “Places we could live” list.

Our definition of “slow travel” is:

• To live in one location for at least one month, more like two;
• Not to live as tourists, but rather attempt to live as a local;
• Use each stop as a base to explore the region.
• Short one or two night excursions, from our base if possible; and
• Have large distances between each stop, forcing us to experience different food and customs.

The idea being, head south during the winter and travel north during the summer months.  Sounds perfect to me. Read more »

The land of the permanent grey cloud!

We have been living in Kerry, Ireland for 5yrs. I think if we stay any longer we’ll start to get damp rot

Ireland is a beautiful country, but as I’ve heard said many times “If we could only tow it a few hundred kilometers south, off France somewhere, we’d all be much happier”  The volume of rain is mind bogling, especially in the south west. Listening to the weather forecast on TV, they really have it off to a fine art, “light rain, with sunny spell, scattered showers with a chance of some sun, mist with low cloud, heavy showers for prolonged periods” add to that high winds and low temperatures and you have Ireland in a nutshell. Read more »