Meet the gang

This is me, Maddie.

This is my dog, Barney.

And this is my 1970-something room on wheels, Val.

She came from somewhere near Geelong from a guy with more mattresses than Forty Winks. The beginning. She’s a Viscount Valiant which are lovingly described as ‘the poor mans caravan’ when they were release back in the 60’s (potentially late 50’s). Viscount stopped making them between 1970-1973, leading me to conclude, after a bit of googling (I’m an excellent internet sifter), that she’s probably a mid to late 70’s model.

It seems to me that buying old vans is a bit of an art. Go too cheap, and you’ll end up with nothing more than a rusted chassis good for a chook house. Pay a bit more and you’ll get something kind of questionable with the potential to turn into a cracker. Pay a lot and you basically get the hard work of someone who went for option 2. I guess I was up for the challenge. The plan is to use this project to learn a whole bunch of new stuff (from my kind of willing carpenter father, and naturally my internet search skillz) and hopefully have a beautiful little portable home at the end. At the very least, I’ll make my money back with a bit of spare change to fuel my Birkenstock habit.