One of the most important decisions when planning to go fulltiming, if not the most important decision, is the layout of the motorhome. Since we made our minds up more than a year ago to go off travelling, we’ve been looking at all the different makes and models of motorhome and their layouts. We’ve been following some excellent groups on Facebook and reading people’s blogs, and we also went to the motorhome show at the NEC last October.
There are so many options with beds on motorhomes. Some are made up from the seats, others have dropdown beds from the cab roof, whilst fixed beds seem to be very popular. Given that we plan to be touring for a couple of years, we don’t want to be making up the bed every night and folding it away the next morning, so that’s not an option. The drop down beds seem to be a lot of faff as well, so we’re not keen on that, which leaves fixed beds.
Many of fixed double beds that we’ve seen would involve one of us climbing over the other to get to the loo in the middle of the night, which is a non-starter. You can get what they call ‘island’ beds where the bed’s in the middle and you can get out each side, but these beds tend to be quite narrow, and we do like our space. So the layout we think we want is a fixed twin bed arrangement at the rear of the ‘van.
There’s a whole list of other things we want, such as a separate loo and shower, a large garage in which to store a couple of bikes and garden furniture, awning, lots of storage space and a decent fridge. As we will be spending a couple of years driving on the wrong side of the road, it would also make sense to buy a left-hand drive vehicle. As I’m a lazy sod, I’d also like an automatic.
We have narrowed our shortlist down to three different models with a similar layout. The one we like the most is a Sunlight T68:
We’ll be hiring one of these ‘vans for a week in September, and testing it out in Norfolk. If we like it then we’ll be going over to Germany to buy one.
Mike