OK. Well that title escalated into the realms of click bait, just a little too easily.

We are settled into the mountain village of Bright for a few days. After only discovering this place relatively recently it has quickly become a go-to destination for us (You can read about our first impressions here).

Ripley is parked up in a shady spot right besides the Ovens river.
Laundry and re-supplying are taken care of and now we are both soaking in the serenity.

Kelly & I spent 3 years figuring out what sort of rig we wanted to purchase. Caravan vs Campervan. Big bus vs small van (my thoughts on these options are here).

We vasillated, we pontificated, we flipped & flopped, until eventually some sort of ideal rig (for us) coalesced out of the ether of uncertainty. Now we just had to find it.

And then Ripley showed up.

She was a little bit bigger than we had intended. But her mileage (kilometreage?) was low and her price was only just outside our comfort zone.

But size equates to volume in the van world. And it is so nice to have space inside where you can sit down and stretch out and move around without too much sidestep squeezing past each other. Except perhaps at mealtimes, when it inevitably becomes a full contact activity.

And there is enough territory for us to just about have our own personal space.

You know…like when I forget to extract all the tissues from my trouser pockets before Kelly washes them (despite her asking me to check) and the entire wash is inseminated with a tissue snow-pocalypse, and words are spoken, and a frosty silence follows and I retreat to the far end of Ripley to lay low until interpersonal normality is re-established….well exactly those times.

And Ripley is big enough to have a whole pile of mod cons. We have a shower and a toilet, a little snug to be sure, but all bathroom activities are totally doable. We have a TV. We have an oven and microwave that makes cooking easy (and vegetarian pizza is a house specialty). We have an air conditioner that intervened in the nick of time to prevent us inflicting bodily harm on each other one meltingly hot frazzled day last summer.

And when the weather is bad you can still cave a comfortable day in Ripley without feeling like you are condemned to eternity in a sardine can.

Yes size definitely doesn’t matter. We have met couples (with pets) who manage perfectly well in a small pop-top campervan, there are entire families that have a blast full-time in the classic VW Kombi vans (just like here), or in smaller DIY camper conversions…and I have even spent a fantastic week away sleeping in the back of our Subaru Forrester.

But I am lucky enough to have a big one.
And for us right now, big is where it’s at.