Melbourne, December 2013

After more than 12 months of caravanning we realized that we really (and I must emphasise the ‘really’) liked this caravanning lifestyle. We had begun thinking about how a van with a bathroom would make life easier. A caravan club Xmas muster at Warrnambool proved to be particularly wet and miserable and that was the last straw. It was time to upgrade. The poptop was advertised online and within days we were towing it up to central Victoria to its new home. We still wave to it as we pass that way.

Thus, a few weeks later, having put a ‘genealogy day’ aside to visit the Public Records Office in North Melbourne in an effort to find out a little more about the life of Woody’s Great Grandfather we ventured on to Campbellfield. A seemingly normal industrial suburb north of the city, Campbellfield just happens to be where the majority of Australian caravans are built and every other factory seems to have something to do with the RV industry.

One visit to a showroom and we’d found the van that would meet our needs. A slightly used little Grant Tourer caravan 18.5 feet or is it 19? Big enough for long trips and small enough to camp beside rivers out in the bush. And with a bathroom, aircon, oven, and hot water, you’d reckon we’d struck gold.

2022 Note: We did 12 trips and 19,500 kilometres with the Viscount Pop Top, not a bad effort considering that we hadn’t caravanned before that. And, I might add, a big improvement on tents. She was a perfect first van for us.

Slightly used? After our first few trips in Priscilla we had her serviced by our van mechanic, who estimated that she’d only done a few 1000 kms most of which had been done by us.