After the enthusiasm stage of any project comes disillusionment, this time with one's capacity to progress at a reasonable rate, even if "reasonable" in one's head is completely unreasonable in real life. Even though we were consoled by the thought that we could just go with a mattress in the back and an icebox the mountain of work ahead did seem insurmountable for a time.
The nice thing about the swivel seat was that it provided a wonderful place to sit and think and watch progress as the van failed to build itself.
With most of the support cupboard shells clamped or just balancing in place there was still an enormous amount of sitting and thinking to do, some of it terribly productive, some of it not quite so.
Sometimes he was sitting and thinking.
But mostly he was just sitting.
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From personal experience (1975, Blue Escort panel van, three months around Australia) we'd strongly suggest the mattress and ice-box option is not a goer. It wasn't suitable for honeymooning newlyweds and I suspect you and your GLW are probably less accomodating than the love-stricken youngsters that we were at the time.
BTW we can't quite decide if your musings are funnier than 'Rosehaven' but we'll keep following both to cheer us up in lockdown.
Ahh Ian, thanks for that.
Our weapon of choice in 1975 was a white Mazda Bongo van. Mattress and icebox were fine then, in the days when an Esky was an Esky (remember that little screw cap to drain the melted ice without removing the contents?).
I absolutely do remember our old, red, steel jacketed Esky - draining the ice every day and replacing it every two. Still had it 40 years later. Did the almost the whole 14,000 km trip at 80km/h after gearbox problems at Whittenoom (we started from Perth). While we had a mattress in the van, we mostly used a centre pole tent. Up in two minutes.
We did everything at 80kph because that's all the Mazda was designed to do! :-)
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