Garage

Or more importantly what's in the Garage....

For our Trepic we chose a Toyota Landcruiser 79 Series. We didn’t really look at anything else. They are incredibly reliable, tough and can pretty much go anywhere we want to. It has a big space in which we could design and fit our canopy (home) and parts are available globally. We added a few extras we thought necessary. These were

ARB Bullbar
Old Man Emu heavy duty suspension upgrade
6 x Cooper ST Maxx tyres
Toyota Diff Lockers
Warn 9 ton winch
ARB Intensity 32 driving lights
ARB Twin air compressor
Recaro Expert Seats

Kitchen

The kitchen was always the most used area in the house. We love to cook, and really didn’t want to be limited by what we could cook on the trip. We will have a lot of time on our hands and so having a good kitchen was pretty important to us.

We based our design on our kitchen at home including the things we didn’t want to live without for the next few years. We ended up with the following

2 Burner Gas Stove
Pizza Oven
Fridge
Freezer
Sink with tap (hot/cold)
Potable water filter
Coffee machine
Coffee grinder
Toaster
Lots of prep space
Food processor / Blender
Pantry
Cutlery drawer
130L Water Tank

To run a kitchen like ours with all of the 240V appliances, fridges, lights and to recharge our devices we needed a decent amount of electricity. In the end we went with the following REDARC products

REDARC Battery Management system 30A
REDARC 2000W sinewave inverter (to run all of our 240V household appliances)
150 Watt fixed Solar Panel
150 Watt Solar blanket
3 x 105 Amp hour deep cycle batteries

Living Room

The kitchen area also doubles as a living room. If it is sunny we can quickly pop out our ARB awning and if we get rained in for a few days we can attach our custom awning room (tent) to create a fully enclosed and weatherproof room.

Then with the Ipad mounted on the wall we can cook up some popcorn and watch a movie or Brett can crack a beer and watch the footy.

Bedroom

The other essential part of the canopy to get right was our sleeping setup. We decided the easiest option would be to attach a roof top tent. The same things applied to bedroom as with the kitchen; we needed to be able to set up and pack up as fast as possible.

In the end there was only one product we wanted. The Backtrax Summit Pro. It’s brilliant. You just undo four clips and press the button on the remote et voilà. The bedroom is ready.

We can leave all of our bedding in there ready to go and to pack up we just use the remote to close the lid and then close the four clips to lock it up. It takes about 30 seconds in total.

*Backtrax are a small family outfit based in Queensland and when we got talking to the owner James we found out that he and his wife had actually spend 2 years driving across North and South America and that they had used that trip as their knowledge base for the design of their tents.

Bathroom

Shower

If we were to avoid the costs of hotels/backpackers then we’d need a shower. As we’ll be in some pretty cold climates it would have to be a hot shower. So we installed a gas hot water system

As we only have room for about 130L of water, we added a second pump so we can shower straight from any water source.

If it's windy or when some privacy is needed, we have a pop up shower screen

Toilet

For the toilet, we found a little fold out camping chair with a hole in it. Works a treat. Just to top it off, we bought a little kids shovel and screwed a toilet roll holder on it. Perfect for digging a hole and then holding the TP.

Shed

We added the a larger storage area as a place to store our bicycles, giving us the flexibility to leave the van set up at a camp site and ride our bikes to the shops, or to the beach.

It also gave us room to throw in some bigger things we might need, like our high lift jack and shovels, as well as some extra room to put other things.