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A Low-budget Travel-car.
I decided to test out how I could turn a cheap old car into the perfect transport for long road-trips, not to camp and completely live in it but more like sleeping in it while on a long leg of driving or when waiting for a ferry, maybe also spending a night in it when you don't have an exact plan on where to go and how much time spending in a single place.
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Read all about this project in the blog I wrote, follow the link below.
I enjoyed driving this car as it took me to the UK and France many times on road trips of 2000 km and more. However, the car did have 220.000 km when I acquired it and it was 16 years old, so I knew it was never going to last very long. The latest trip I did wasn't very far but it was about 2 hours from home to the German region of the Moselle river, this area has its challenges as the steep mountains and valleys around the river are a driver's nightmare, this eventually killed the car to the point that repairing it was no longer an economic option.
So what next? ... I learned a lot from this experiment and took notes along the way. Anno 2022, buying a car is a challenge, I had a lot of factors to consider and ended up going for a Hybrid (not a plug-in Hybrid!) as my demand on a car is pretty heavy! I decided to go for a very good young Toyota approved second hand station wagon and ended up with the new 2021 Toyota Corolla 1.8 petrol hybrid break full option Dynamic+ ... wow that's a mouthful ... I picked it up on November 21 at my local Toyota dealer (Follow this link).
Because this car is much younger and is under warranty, I can't just go and alter it, so from the lessons I learned from the old Ford, the next plan is to build a travel-rack-unit that I can put in the car when preparing for a trip and take out again when arriving back home. For the moment not much will be done on the car as my house has the first priority, however I did have the towbar installed in early May.
At the end of December 2022, I made a short trip to Dover and felt how well the car is adapted for long drives and even has some easy features that make life more relaxed when traveling, the Dynamic Cruise Control adapts to counting in Miles instead of Kilometers when driving in England. This was also the first ferry-ride for my Toyota.
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