Hiya Guys. Good to hear youre hitting the road. Its amazing how many people are travelling nowdays with young children - its a really common sight. And a lot of them are of school age which I guess makes home schooling of them interesting.

Hope you've got lots to keep your 3 yr old occupied and wont end up with a daily "are we there yet????" LOL

Lots of questions........

We don't have a check sheet - we have got into a routine when we arrive and when we leave. The most important is when you leave. My wife does the inside (makes sure the fridge is running through the Anderson plug from our ute and everything is where it should be and wont smash or break something (the SA roads are as rough as, so make sure glasses and other breakables aren't touching each other and open all the drawers and cupboards slowly in case something falls out onto your head !

We have a Dometic awning on our 'van (most of the new ones are Dometic). Once closed, you squeeze the two arms together and one locks into the other and then you tighten up a knob. We also wrap Velcro around the tops of the closed arms to ensure they wont blow open. We have heard of a couple of cases when this has happened when the people were happily driving along the road. We also use Velcro to keep our hoses (water and sullage) and electrical leads rolled up into a neat circle and a hose extender clip to join the two ends of the same hose together to stop water leaking out. We plug the lead ends into each other. We always carry two electrical leads (Bunnings sell them), two water hoses and two sulluge pipes. You will be amazed at how many CPs you will need them due to the poor layout of the various services in many Parks

I walk slowly around the outside of the van standing back about 4 metres or so and visually check all is closed - hatches down, TV aerial is down etc. Then I do a close up check of the tow hitch, the various plugs and chains and make sure the tow bar is on the tow ball fully.

We try to stop down the road within 10-15 minutes of leaving and repeat the process again - just to make sure all is OK. Every morning before I start the ute, the bonnet goes up and I check oil, water etc and a quick visual of the motor and under the bonnit for any water or oil sprays.

If we stay at the same place for a week or two, I always check both vehicle tyre pressures the day before we leave, otherwise its every couple of days. Go buy a decent quality tyre guage - don't rely on the one at a Servo which has been dropped onto the concrete a 1000 times or run over.

My battery charge is normally full at about 13.5 - but that varies depending on the number of batteries and size - I'll leave the Techo stuff up to the Techies ))

The most important thing is to get into a routine of checking your vehicles and you wont need yet another sheet of laminated paper to cart around

Good luck, take it easy, don't rush it - slow down and smell and see our beautiful country and enjoy yourselves !!!