July 1997
It all started around June '97. Chris and
I are camping at Fraser Island and Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland.
Several days of sitting around watching the kangaroos, shooing away
the possums, bushwalking, a little photography and plenty of cider.
Life could be a lot worse.

Fig 1. The troopie (75 series
Landscruiser) at Carnarvon Gorge.
Chris says, "Why don't we retire". You
could have knocked me over with a feather. Who's stolen my workaholic
wife and replaced her with someone who can utter such a sentence
I thought. Now if I'd said it that would be a different matter,
after all, I've been retired all my life. But for Chris to think
of anything except work is just unheard of.
OK I'm happy to retire, after all I'm nudging
44 and had a gutfull of the rat race but what will I do? Well if
you've come here from my main site the answer should be pretty clear,
landscape photography. Trouble is, Chris isn't the least bit interested
in landscape photography (or photography of any kind for that matter)
so she needs to be comfortable while I'm out making those memorable
images. For that matter I need to be comfortable in between sojourns.
Also, to get good images I want to spend long periods (a few weeks
maybe) in picturesque and often very remote places. These requirements
call for a special kind of vehicle.
Enter the off-road motorhome.
Off-road motorhomes aren't bought off-the-shelf,
they have to be custom made so, as our finances don't stretch to
having someone else build the thing, I guess the job falls to me.
After all how hard can it be :-).
We return from Carnarvon and promptly buy all
the current "4x4 trader" style magazines. There aren't
all that many options when it comes to large off-road vehicals.
An Isuzu, Mitsubishi Canter or MAN seem to be the most likely candidates
but the Canter is too small, Isuzu only make 4x4s and the MANs are
soooo expensive. We did briefly entertain the idea of buying a new
Isuzu, but at $120,000 odd that idea hardly saw the light of day.
An old ACCO seem to be more our style but they
are mostly worn out work horses with a life of toil behind them
on some farm in central Queensland. A long way to drive to reject
some run down wreck.
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