Buying the van

Our van is a 2016 Knaus Sky Ti 700 MEG. We bought it when it was six months old, with just 2,500 miles on the clock. It was in showroom condition, just like having a brand new van, only someone else had paid the 20% VAT for us.

This apparently happens quite often, typically where people who are buying their first ever motorhome go to the motorhome show at the NEC without having done a huge amount of research, and get carried away. There are so many permutations of different van types, sizes and layouts, so not getting the right model can work out very expensive.

We did loads of research before buying ours, looking at manufacturers’ websites, as well as reading people’s blogs and joining various Facebook groups. We worked out which layouts we thought would be best for us and went to the motorhome show to see them in real life – this was a whole year before we actually bought – and we came away pretty sure of the exact layout we wanted.

Our next step was to rent a van in our preferred layout, and spending a week travelling around Norfolk gave us final confirmation that the layout we’d chosen was the one for us. A week later we put a deposit down on our motorhome.

I would have ideally liked to have bought a left hand drive, given that we’d be driving around continental Europe for a couple of years, and we did at one point consider importing a LHD van from Germany. However, the fall of the Pound against the Euro following the Brexit vote put paid to that, so we ended up with a RHD van.