Off-Road Caravan Training
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
We finally managed to get our Jurgens Xplorer off the driveway since we bought last year and take it out for a bit of a spin.
We have never towed anything in our lives before so opted for some professional assistance from Dean at MK Towing who took us through our ‘learner’ paces.
This was to ensure that not only could we attach and detach our caravan safely, but that we could learn safe driving considerations with our heavy load (1800kg mass weight!) behind us.
We had great fun and took to the Jurgens straight away (well almost! - reversing it back into our driveway with a pile of on-coming traffic (and this was without two tired children) was a bit of a challenge).
Needless to say, Dean was great at teaching us the relevant considerations and safety aspects. Dean calmly put us through our paces (we went to Silverstone to do the training). Hard to imagine sometimes that in less than 11 months the Jurgens will be virtually our only form of living quarters for the duration of our forthcoming trip.
Although we have provided updates on previous posts, our initial observations once driving is that the Jurgens is very compact and smooth - no additional caravan mirrors required (though we might think about purchasing anyway - more for reversing than anything else). The wheels of the caravan are the same size as the Land Rover so we can swap between both for spares (we will ensure all of the tyres are identical before we go). The nose of the caravan is very heavy (we have the older version of the Jurgens where 2 X 20L water is stowed), making the Land Rover dip at the rear (the new version of Jurgens has moved the water now to one container in the rear we think). We spoke to Foleys’ about the rear of the LR when dipping when towing and were advised that our vehicle will definately need to have suspension upgraded to cope.
