The mileage tells the truth more plainly than I could. A hundred and twenty-one thousand when I bought it; a hundred and twenty-two now. A thousand miles in just under three years, and a good chunk of those will be today.

I brought it home on the first of July, near enough two years ago, in the same state of excitement I had carried back from Germany. It promptly took over the driveway. It blocked the garage, made a nuisance of itself for ordinary daily use, and stood there far larger than the life around it. I measured the whole chassis end to end and built it up in CAD, and then arranged storage elsewhere simply to have our drive back.

After that I kept at the CAD in the evenings, working through the habitation box, how it might mount, how the living space would divide. The mounting was the part that weighed most. A ladder-frame truck chassis is meant to flex and twist along its length as the wheels ride over rough ground; that is not a fault, it is the design working. Bolt a rigid box straight onto a frame that moves like that and it will tear at its fixings or crack apart over a season or two. The accepted answer is a torsion-free subframe, often a three-point arrangement, which lets the chassis twist beneath the box while the box stays largely unstressed. I spent a great many evenings turning that problem over, and part of why getting it right felt so heavy was that there is no casual version of it.

And yet it never felt right. I could not have told you why. I would go back to the model, move things about, and never once arrive at the quiet certainty of that’s the one. Time passed. The van sat in the storage compound gathering dust, out of sight and, soon enough, out of mind. I had to put it through its MOT twice and have it serviced once over those years, and even those small duties were awkward. At over three and a half tonnes the thing counts as a heavy goods vehicle, so it needs a specialist MOT test station, and there are few of those, generally booked weeks ahead. Servicing was easier in principle, since any garage may service it, but at close to nine metres long very few garages would take it through their doors.

Two things slowly changed my mind, though I did not feel them as a turning at the time. At Allrad in 2025, our second visit, we went round deliberately looking at the smaller vehicles and at the Bruder off-road caravans, asking ourselves what we genuinely needed and how little space it might actually take. Then, later in 2025, we spent a fortnight in a small coach-built camper in Portugal, and we came away thinking that even that had been larger than we needed, given a bit of discipline in the planning. That was the start of the search for the new vehicle, the one we now call Morrison. The dropside, meanwhile, went on sitting unused, immaculate inside because it had never once been put to any purpose.

What finally moved it was not a fresh insight. It was the insurance and tax coming up for renewal. That administrative nudge brought the van back to mind, and I decided there and then to enter it into a commercial auction, which takes place next week.

I have been turning over what to take from all this. The honest version is unflattering. A vehicle bought to cross the world covered about a thousand miles in two years, sat in a compound, and quietly cost me specialist test bookings, the hunt for a garage long enough, and tax and insurance ticking over month after month for a thing I never saw. The deeper lesson is the one about being out of sight. Once it was stored away the problem stopped nagging at me, but it did not go away; it simply persisted, unsolved, for years. The right order of priorities would have had me face the thing that plainly was not working, rather than let distance and inertia decide it for me. I named the conflict only in hindsight, that pull between a big box built for developed-world comfort and a wish to go light and far, and even now I hold the naming of it loosely.