When all is quiet, buy a new caravan.

We’ve found a new home! (This one’s not ours) Now we just have to sell the house to pay for it.

We’re at a stage now where we have things to be really excited and nervous about, and yet, those things are quite a way down the track, and nothing is really locked in. Have you ever planned an epic holiday? In the early stages you’re planning your itineraries and all your “must do” activities and places that “can’t be missed”, and the anticipation invites exhilarating sensations that are all so thrilling you can almost feel it. And yet, while it’s starting to take shape and become real it’s just so far away—like a kid at Christmas time. Well that’s kind of where we’re at.

We can report that not much is happening with regard to selling our home. Of course, by “not much”, I actually mean nothing is happening. In fact, the market seems to be so quiet that we have moved from weekly open homes, to views by appointment, and we’ll look to recommence open homes after a few weeks . It does make sense, as most of views during open homes weren’t genuine buyers, rather, just tyre kickers and those out for a weekend drive—viewing by appointment might help to weed the tyre kickers out. Having said that, it only takes a tyre kicker to become a potential buyer. What are you to do? In any case, it will be good to have a short break from the open home process and prep.

But with that, whilst all that nothing is going on, we’ve locked in a van, and a new build, at that! We’re super excited and, sure, we certainly would have saved ourselves a lot of money had we bought a used van, but this would have been proved difficult due to our circumstances. We’d have to wait until after the house is sold in order to have the cash, and then we have to begin searching for a van. There’s no point in finding the ideal used van without having access to funds to pay for it—there’s no telling how long it will take to find a buyer and for settlement to occur, so no one will be willing to hold a van for us under those circumstances.

We’ve decided to go ahead with the newer brand on the market, Rembrandt. How new? While they’ve been around for a couple of years, I think, when we call companies to arrange some insurance and they look through their extensive list of brands, it’s nowhere to be found and they’ve never heard of it. You might be wondering why we’d be prepared to risk our hard-earned dollars on an unknown brand. As I said before, all good brands have to start somewhere. Rembrandt, Australian owned and manufactured, have been around for barely a couple of years now but are trying to break into the market. With that, and with smaller build numbers, we’re hoping that makes for a good quality build, particularly as they likely have something to prove. And so, I suppose, it’s a leap of faith.

We have opted for the Nightwatch, an off-road variant, ordered at a length 21.6’ feet—just under 30 feet, or 9.1m, including the drawbar. The fact that it is a meranti timber frame may be a drawback, but for budget we’re bringing to the table, a composite framed van is not an option. There are pros and cons with all vans, I’m sure. With a timber frame the risk is obviously rotting should it leak, and with aluminium, they have been known to suffer when off-road, particularly at the welds. I can’t say I’m aware of any cons associated with a lightweight composite van, but that is out of reach for us anyway.

Pricing for our van just scrapes in under $100k in Australian dollars as a standard package, and once spec’d up, comes in around the same price as the wide bunk van we initially had on order. We have opted to upgrade from AGM batteries to a 300amp hour lithium set-up with 630w of solar on the roof. We have based that on our previous van order and, to be honest, in as much as we’ve tried to research, we have no idea if that will be sufficient or if it’s overkill. We’ve also upgraded to a compressor fridge/freezer, along with a full width toolbox, with slides, at the front of the van, and a passive dust reduction system. Oh, and we’ve also opted to forgo the chemical cassette toilet for a Nature’s Head composting toilet. I’m sure we’ll get into whether that was a good choice or not down the track. Other than those upgrades the van will be as it comes. In addition to those couple of things to get excited about, the great news is that delivery is scheduled for about 3 months’ time, bringing the delivery date a month sooner than the previous van we had on order (prior to them pushing the date out)—what’s more, we’ve been told that, to date, the manufacturer has never had to push out a delivery date on a van. Again, as they say, a deal isn’t done until it’s done, but that does provide us some confidence and some much-needed reassurance.

In the meantime, that leaves us proverbially flipping through travel brochures and Lonely Planet books, or ticking off those days leading to Christmas, if you like, in anticipation of the day we begin our adventure, or at the very least until there’s some certainty that it’s all coming together.