Hi everyone, We are newbies to the forum however we have just celebrated 1 year of ownership of our Aussie Swag. We ordered late 2010 & drove to Brendale to pick it up personally & be shown how to manage the setup by James. We had extensive discussions in the time when we first placed the order & eventually picked it up. We ordered the Explorer version with the 2011 s/s kitchen splash back, 80ltr Evakool fridge, all the canvas minus the children's room & shower room.
I have since added a 1500watt pure sine wave inverter & some additional external LED lighting. The team at Aussie Swag put all the necessary heavy wiring in for the inverter so all I had to do was wire it in.
We had friends with a slightly earlier AS Rover model & loved the amazingly solid & practical construction the kitchen & fridge area. They had just returned from the Kimberley region & had a totally trouble free trip. We looked at the other top brand but were put off by the difficulty in talking to the builder via a 3rd person dealer & a couple of other things.
November 2011 we headed off for our first long trip, we had done a couple of short trial trips before this one. We headed for the Eyre Peninsular from NW Sydney towing the Aussie Swag behind a 2002 100 series turbo diesel landcruiser with 225,000 k's on the clock. I added airbags to the rear suspension & with the Treg Hitch the AS towed beautifully, fuel consumption increased from 13lts per 100k's to around 16 to 18lts per 100k's. We went as far west as Streaky Bay & made day trips as far as Ceduna. We free camped in Coffin Bay National Park & later in the Lincoln National Park, sand was not a problem towing the Aussie Swag. We met a number of other very happy Aussie Swag Owners & even one who had sold & bought a caravan & were going back home to sell the caravan & order anoth Aussie Swag.
In all we traveled 7500 k,s in 6 weeks, all kinds of weather from quite cool to extreme heat, gale force winds & pouring rain. Our AS did not let us down at all, only one scary moment during a wind storm when the hard floor looked like it could lift so I pegged it down & tied off to a wheel on the cruiser.
On our return to Sydney I have some problems with the Landcruiser & had to give it a heart transplant, the electronic injector pump had major issues, I replaced it at great cost.
Just last week we took the AS to Newnes in the Wolgan Valley & free camped for a few days, it was again a mix of all conditions from heavy freezing rain to gale force winds & finally some fine cold weather. The annexe area was warmed with a kero heater & the bedroom with a coleman catalytic gas heater running on lpg, the vent in the bedroom tropical roof makes this possible without any health hazards.
Look forward to making some more posts in the future & I will upload some pictures as soon as I learn how to do it.
Bruce & Nola.
