GoRV - Digital Magazine Issue #92 | Page 14

RV REVIEW
Asked whether there was anything about the van he or his wife would change , now that they ’ d lived in the van for four months , he said , “ Definitely not . The layout worked great for us . The fact it stood up to everything we threw at it , and stood up to it well , gave us confidence . We just pointed our car in that northern direction and the van followed .”
Finally , when I first saw this van – before they departed – Mitch expressed some small uncertainty that he hadn ’ t opted for airbag suspension , instead fitting Cruisemaster ’ s ATX independent trailing arm coil setup . Now that the trip is in the rearview mirror , does he still feel that way ?
Well , as he said , there were only a couple of occasions when he felt airbags would have been handy , and even then it was only for levelling purposes on uneven sites , which he resolved anyway via a block of wood under one wheel . But throughout the trip , whether it was on the Gibb River Road or poking off the highway to find a free camp in the red dirt , the ATX performed brilliantly .
Mitch ’ s Goldstream 1760 RE CD weighs in at 2489kg Tare , and has an ATM of 2965kg , for a payload capacity of 476kg . Throughout their trip , their Y62 Patrol tow vehicle averaged 20.89L / 100km of unleaded . Before departing for their trip , with their van fully loaded , Mitch called in to his work to use Goldstream ’ s scale – one of the benefits of working for a caravan manufacturer – and discovered they had 34kg left of payload capacity .
“ For the best part of the trip , towing nearly 3000kg , those were fairly reasonable fuel costs ,” he said .
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