As it happened, our Sunday silo sojourn was really our last great Victorian adventure. We were very busy enjoying Christmas and our wonderful "family reunion", spending time with Nissa, counting-down Nick's last few weeks in the Melbourne office - and getting ready for our QLD relocation!
In mid January we packed up my tent kitchen (because by that stage the girls were sharing a basic cabin and I could cook in there - with running water).
You can see the tent's lighting in the pic at left. Each room had LED strip lights with on/off switches. It was really quite neat!
Three days before departure, the big tent was packed down and trussed securely for storage, together with our pseudo-Persian carpets. We well and truly gained our money's worth from those purchases - it was really a *very* interesting period of our family history!
We bought our caravan cheaply, with plans of using it for weekends away or a few weeks at a time. In contrast, it was our home-base from October 2015 until early February 2017 - around 18 months in total. We were fortunate to do several house-sitting stints (which we greatly appreciated) but for the most part we were in the van.
I've just calculated 412 nights were spent in the van out of a total 492. Three cheers for Nick who did the full 412, whereas the rest of us had short breaks over that period!
To give you an idea, the entire interior of the caravan is approx 2.75m by 4.5m (which included our beds). The four of us and Bandit shared that space. Yep, it was definitely cosy, so you can see why we appreciated the tent’s extra living area - and our day-trip adventures!
Did we expect to be in transit for so long? No way. Was it hard? Yeah, at times it was tricky but we did it - and we're impressed with our fortitude! Would we do it again? Not by choice in our current set-up and definitely not in Victoria!
The big tent was wrapped in a cheap tarp. (It had originally been housed in a piece of air mattress but that was far too cumbersome). I'd bought a $5.00 curtaining remnant from the local op shop earlier in the month and used it to make two generous tent peg bags. We also found a $2.00 laptop-style bag, which was great for housing tent pegs.
