First trip!

​After an intense week building on any spare time, we finally got to take a test trip. We went down to the Fredrikstad/Hvaler area for a night.

​We had quite a bit ready for the trip. Three of the 4 mattresses had hand sown covers on them that AM made. We had started on the kitchen cabinet and it had a drawer that held our Dometic fridge. I’m still missing a 12V extension cable, so the fridge runs off the 230V invert for now. It’s the least efficient way to do it since the power is transformed twice, but it works. For this trip, we only had a single 100W solar panel so the power was dwindling all the time, but the battery on the Yeti 3000X is so big it didn’t matter.

To our surprise, the mattresses were too hard. We both had sore backs and we dreaded splashing out another 4k NOK for new and softer one’s. However - after talking to the shop, they said that this will improve over time and if it does not, they would help us out. Fingers crossed for that! AM certainly wasn’t keen on resowing the covers as they have this funky, slanted groove in the side that took a long time to get right.

Apart from that, the trip was great and everything worked as intended. There were however a lot of odd sounds in the car as we were driving and we solved these by fastening things as we discovered them. We found a nice place by the sea to sleep and we drove to a marina for breakfast. In the eve, I checked the tighness of the car and well…. It’s not stellar? My friend Thomas mentioned that sleeping in an airtight van can be dangerous. Based on the amount of light spilling out around the doors, I’m not too afraid of that :-D

All in all a very successful test trip and we also checked the total weight when we passed a roadside scale. The car is now 2580kg, so still a bit off from the 2800kg limit.