Have Kayak – will travel

As I look back through photographs of our travels I am reminded how much work we have done to the bus and some of the improvements we’ve made that have made life SO much easier.

One of these, which I won’t document too much or publish photos of… was adding a toilet.

When we bought the bus it did not have a bathroom or even a toilet room – just an L shaped partition with a free-standing porta-potti behind a curtain. I wasn’t very keen on it.

My clever hubbie Sam constructed a toilet room in which he fitted a cassette toilet, a small wash basin, a bathroom cabinet… and a door.

Yep, that was quite high on my list.

We travelled in the bus last summer (around the Coromandel coast) with our kayaks. We had to tow a trailer with which to carry the kayaks. At several points along the journey we lost several parts of said trailer and Sam used quite a few swear words. He borrowed some tools and a blow torch from a friendly camp-site owner and we made it home with most of the trailer.

This summer we travelled in the bus (around the East Cape) with our kayaks. No trailer.

After purchasing a ladder on Trade Me, Sam installed it on the back of the bus and fit a deck… sorry… a roof rack so we can easily (ish) lift the kayaks up there and take them with us with no extra hassle.

It’s great and we’ve actually got room (but not yet enough cashflow) for a roof box of some kind up there too.

You can never have enough storage space in a campervan.

(One day we’ll get the paintwork finished – it doesn’t affect whether we can travel or not – so at the moment it will just have to wait.)  

Having the kayaks with us means we get extra enjoyment from our travels.

It’s amazing to go out on the sea (when it’s calm though eh Sam?!) and we’ve found many beauty spots by lakes and rivers that we would never have seen by land.

Lake Tarawera

Secret(ish) waterfall on Lake Karapiro

Cooks Beach, Coromandel