You may have seen our inside van tour, now it’s time to share the outside. Our Jayco Journey Outback, 22.68-1 is a great caravan that we’ve been living in full time for the past 2 months. Let’s take a tour of the outside of the caravan, sharing all of the ins and outs, features and some of the tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way on our lap of Australia.
The Living Room
The awning area is our living room, and we have a C-Gear Multimat for flooring which has been brilliant. We have used one for years when camping in a tent, so getting a bigger one for the caravan just made a lot of sense. We also have a C-Gear Multimat for the privacy screens, side and rear of the awning area.
We secure our awning with ratchet straps and coach bolts. We share information on our extras we added after handover in our article “What you don’t get at handover”.
Also in the living room area of our awning is our table and our Oztrail chairs. We’ve partnered with Oztrail for this trip, you can check out what we have on our Oztrail page.
We have an entertainment hatch where we can access 12V and 240V power, put our TV on an extension arm or a little projector like we have which we purchased second hand before our trip.
The Kitchen
We have a slide out kitchen at the front of the van, coming out of the boot. This slide and fold out kitchen has a sink with hot and cold water, a two burner cooktop and room for us to place our Webber Babby Q on the end. These plug in to two bayonettes just under the caravan.
We also have a collapsible dish container that takes all of our dirty dishes. When off the grid water needs to be used wisely, and by placing dirty dishes in the container we keep flies and animals away until we get around to washing a full container.
The Laundry
We have a washing machine inside the caravan, so after a wash we need somewhere to hang the washing from the caravan. We have an old pegless clothesline we have had for years, and also use Ikea Octopus peg hangers to hang up all of our washing, as well as tea towels and swimming gear as needed.
The Business Side
At the off side of the caravan we have all of our connections and access areas. We have the cassette for the toilet, power and water connections. We have three 82 Litre water tanks which tend to last us 4 days or so with sporadic showers and monitoring of general water use. We have our waste outlets connected to send out down a grey water hose. We have our front boot to keep all of our chocks and leveling ramps, spare solar equipment, awning supports and privacy screens in a handy location.
The Front
Up front we have two 9kg gas bottles, which last us around 6-8 weeks each. We have a compressor fridge, not a two way, so the gas just does our hot water when off grid and cooking. We have a Thule superb bike rack up front, that tilts forward to allow clear access to the gas bottles. We have our ESC, Breakaway Controller and Camera links that connect to the car, along with the standard chains.
The Rear
We have dual cameras at the back of the van, one looking straight down for reversing and one looking back whilst driving. This really helps with manouvering the van, displayed on our clip on monitor over our rear view mirror.
We also have an Oztrail spare wheel bag on the back that keeps our hoses and connections as well as rubbish when camping off grid to keep it away from flies and animals.
Up top
Up top of the caravan we have all season hatches for airflow, air conditioning, satellite and our two 150W solar panels. We have an additional Redarc solar blanket we use to boost up the system, direct to the batteries via a Redarc Anderson extension lead and Redarc solar controller. Check out our Redarc setup on our Redarc page.
That’s it, that’s the outside of the van and hopefully this gives you some good info if looking to add to an existing caravan or perhaps buy your own new one. We love our Jayco and have it set up fantastically well for our big lap of Australia. If you have any questions please hit us up in the comments, or get in touch via social media.