Hello. I’m Rachel. My husband is Paul, and we (of the royal variety) are converting a minibus into a campervan for lots of mini-breaks around South East Queensland. We vaguely hatched this plan in 2009 while pootling around New Zealand’s South Island in a little Britz motorhome (which is where I took the photo at the top of this blog – one of our favourite drives out of Queenstown).

There’s something about travelling in a campervan that puts a smile on your face; fancy being able to just pull over to the side of the road / glacier to make a cup of tea any time you want! Not only that, but you’ll never go anywhere and realise you’ve forgotten your umbrella, because all your stuff is always right there!! (Very useful in NZ, we found, to always have a brolly on hand.) So anyway, after 3 weeks, we were hooked.

Added to that, we have lived in Brisbane now for five years and there are still loads of places around SE Qld and Northern NSW that we still haven’t visited, because they’re just out of reach for a day-trip. This way, we can take off after work on Friday and be home for the Biggest Loser on Sunday evening.

Not only that but Paul is looking for a ‘hobby’, particularly for those weekends when I am holed up at the computer working on uni assignments (weekends that, admittedly, don’t occur as often as they should).

So the plan was to buy a little van to convert into our own campervan et voila, we’d fulfill all criteria in one fell swoop. The little van in question would not, sadly, be an uber-cool VW kombi, but a Toyota Hiace – aka a maxi-taxi. Never mind. It will still be very cool and best of all, will have a toilet and a grill! Paul is aiming for surfer chic; let’s see how we go.

We actually bought the van a couple of months ago, and I’ve been scribbling notes about our initial campervan exploits since then. A blog does seem to be the way to go though, so here we are.