Once we were seriously considering travelling around Australia, we knew we would need something more substantial than a Coleman tent and some basic camping gear which had been what we had used to date when we headed away camping for a week here and there. So began the long road to buying a camper trailer.

Stu did a lot of early research, studying websites, magazines and forums to understand the differences between caravans, Jaycos, soft-floor, hard-floor, forward-fold etc and try to work out what would suit our family. Although we thought the hard-floors looked good, once we then went to a few camping shows to look at them in the flesh, we decided they were too small. We also decided we wanted something with an outdoor kitchen, and something that was off-road capable so we could take it where the car would go. A few more shows later and we had settled on a soft-floor camper and narrowed it down to either Complete Campsites or Trackabout trailers.

They were both out of the budget for a new one so we started to look at the second hand market, expecting it would take a while. Stu found a few second hand ads on the Complete Campsites website, and one in particular caught his eye. Not saying where they were based on the ad, Stu decided to call them up, mainly to rule it out as an option assuming it wouldn’t be in Sydney, but after calling them up, not only were they based in southern Sydney, but they had reduced the price by a third and were desperate to sell. We went and saw it that weekend. It was in great condition and had everything we wanted so we put a deposit down straight away. The next week, with the help of a friend and their car (as we didn’t actually have a car that could tow a trailer yet) we got it back to our front yard.

Once we upgraded the Avalon to be able to tow it, we took off down the south coast to try out our new toy. It was great, apart from almost breaking the Avalon’s rear suspension. We were sold on this new, more spacious and comfortable form of camping, and were another step closer to taking off on our dream adventure.

The only thing we have done to it since buying it is to put in a second gas port so we can plug the Weber directly into the gas, rather than having to run it from a bottle.