G’Day
My name is Mick and along with my wife Vickie we welcome you to our Blog, Our number plate on our car is NIKNOFF and that’s what we enjoy doing, especially once the colder wet weather of winter arrives. We have been touring around Australia for many years and visiting and staying along the Ningaloo coast for 30 years, we still rate it as one of the best camping spots in Australia though it’s become more popular and harder to get a booking
Our early years were weekends away with our kids, first in tents and then camper trailers. In 2005 we bought our 1st Caravan a Kedron and in 2007 we upgraded to Bushtracker Off Road Van.
We have easily travelled over 300.000 kilometres around and through Australia in the last 15 years, from 2009 we lived full time for six years in our Bushtracker and though we would have loved to have updated it to more modern specs and a different layout for the bed, financially it was not practical so we sold it in 2022 and bought a new Masterpiece Optimum Off Road caravan, it lacked for nothing in its equipment level but a few things we knew were just not as much attention to detail as the Bushtracker, but it was $100,000 cheaper !!! Yep a new Bushtracker is around $230,000 these days. .
In the last year Masterpiece have produced a new model of the Optimum and I was extremely pleased to see how improved they were, a complete new design chassis and suspension and a awesome Victron Battery management system, enough improvements for us to trade our 2022 model in and have a 2024 built. We have had that van for nearly 3 months and apart from two minor issues the van is everything we could wish for. We have also upgraded tow vehicle to a Chev Silverado 2500HD so we know our rig is perfectly legal with its weights.
It’s highly unlikely we will be doing what we do in another 15 years 😂 but we intend to keep touring around whilst we can.
Anyhow, we hope you enjoy what you see and get some ideas for your own travels.
C’ya around
Mick & Vickie
