Believe it or not there are a few things we’d change about our beloved Travato. We thought we could come up with a list of three of them, but as we discussed it there’s really only two that need addressing at this time.
The first one, and the only one we’ll look into making a mod while on the road is to make the platform for the passenger side bed easier to raise to keep raised so you can get things out from under the bed. The current setup might work with nothing on the bed. I’m not sure it would work with even a sleeping bag added, but it doesn’t work at all with a mattress pad and memory foam topper added. There’s just too much weight and the little piston thingy just can’t hold it up… and… it’s freaking heavy and awkward to lift it up. So, we’re going to look into ways we could improve this, with the most likely resolution being a locking chest door hinge. We could order one from Amazon and may do that but when you’re living on the road and moving around every few days you have to really know your schedule to be able to have something arrive in a city on a day you’re going to actually be there. Something comes in late and you have to hang around waiting, which throws the whole remaining schedule off. So, we might hold off on this mod until we get back to our sticks and bricks house in April.
The other mod we are seriously considering is swapping out the factory tires with K2 off-road tires. We spend a lot of time on dirt roads, sandy roads and muck. While the factory tires are quiet and get great gas mileage, they are not the best for semi-off-road situations. But, we only have 10,000 miles on them so I don’t see us making this change on this trip either, but of the two mods we’re considering this one would actually be much easier to do while traveling.
We considered adding a table that moves all around, giving us the potential for a nightstand kind of table and one that we could play games on and eat off of… but the passenger seat table when the seat is swiveled around is awesome. And the drivers side “table”, while not perfect, actually works. So, we’ll choose less stuff in the van and less clutter over the functionality an additional table would provide.
All in all, after 19 days on this trip, which will likely last 3-4 months, the van is very, very, very comfortable. Maybe it’s just that we adapt well to living together in small spaces. Maybe it’s because we are pretty good at putting things back in their spot when we finish using them. Or maybe we have the van arranged in a way that just works for us. Either way, we are more than happy about traveling around in this 59K Travato. We’ll post an update if we actually do any of these two mods, but we feel it speaks highly of the design of the Travato that we can live in it this long and not have a really long list of things to do to make it better. It’s crazy that that list is only two things and one of them is just getting a different type of tire when the time comes! Way to go Winnebago!
This week’s Wednesday video:
VAN TREKKING lifestyle 