A 26-yr-old, scrapped, yet well-maintained Iveco fire brigade pickup truck with an awning and a hydraulic loading ramp. 4600 €! Total madness!
But I will buy it nonetheless, although I'm shaking in my boots at the prospect of such a huge expense (at least for me).
Here is why: My wife and I love riding our old Triumph motorcycles. And we love to travel in distant destinations like Scotland or Sicily.
The unpleasent part of it: In order to vacate there, you have to get there first. Which means butt numbing hours on end on crammed and/or jammed autobahnen, either in baking sun or pouring rain (there never seems to be something in between both extremes while travelling), plus twice the fuel for both bikes and double the road toll in France, italy etc. Food and drink has mostly to be bought on the road. Oh, not to forget the luggage limitations on a motorcycle!
After two days you're mostly not even near to your destination! In the meantime you need hotels or at least B&Bs (I don't like Air B&B), forcing you to unpack the bikes in the evening and to re- pack them the next morning. Very money and time consuming.
Once arrived, you're a considerable sum of money down, you're exhausted and the holiday hasn't even started. And of course you need accomodation while being on location. And time and money resources for your way home.
All this makes long distance travelling on two motorcycles both very inconvenient and very expensive.
Now, with this truck all of the disadvantages above are eliminated: We can load both bikes in the truck bed, pack whatever kind of stuff we need or like, trail our little camping trailer - and set off!
- The truck needs less diesel than both bikes need petrol.
- Camping grounds are way, way cheaper than hotels.
- We arrive faster because we can drive in shifts.
- We can bring more clothing than the odd three underpants and three pairs of socks, something that is much appreciated after two weeks on a bike.
- We can bring along food and drink supplies and even a small fridge (no more stale, luke warm water in a plastic bottle from the tank bag, hooray!).
- There's plenty of space for tools and spares that can usually not be brought along.
- Because of its age the truck is equipped with very little electronics, maintenance costs are lower and I can do a lot of maintenance myself, like I do already on our motorcycles.
- Not to mention the spacious cargo area that might come in very handy in many everyday life situations.
So maybe it is not that stupid after all to lust after this truck?
Let's hope I haven't fallen prey to wishful thinking. Humans are full of assumption biases . . .