We spent 14mths over 2016 bouncing around Oz with our 2014 single ended 20ft Expanda OB behind the greatest car ever, the mighty Navara V6 D40. We (read the Princess) home schooled our then very schooling reluctant 10 year old. He received a year level Cert of Education Excellence from Dist Ed, and it wasnt terribly onerous on the Princess. The schooling certainly never interfered with our travel plans. We much prefer freecamping, the further away, more remote and the less people the better. Our only firm plan before we left for our trip was to basically forget the van was there, and go everywhere we would go if we didn't have the van. If the van took a beating in the process, so be it. The only places excluded from our list was northern Cape York and the Mitchell Plateau and that was only because I didn't want to find a place to store camping gear for 3 weeks of use.
The van performed admirably, we still have it and still use it a lot. Its still in pretty good condition, we still love it and I have no intentions of changing it until the Crusket hits 18 and we don't need the bunks. We dragged (and still drag) our van to places that many people wouldn't take a tent. From my experience, my travels, and seeing how many other vans performed I would not under rate my van a "semi" off roader by comparison. There isn't to many place we didn't get to. We did have a few non fatal issues, but to put that into context we seen worse issues with other much more expensive so called off road vans.
One night the Crusket cracked the $hits whilst we were all watching TV. After a while, we realised he wasnt around and we both wondered where the hell he'd gone. We called out to him and got no response. I got up and found him at the other end of the van, in his bunk with his headphone on ... you know your van is officially big enough when you loose a child in it.
