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We are Mike and Jackie and along with our severely disabled 13 year old son, Adam, we found it not always practical to use holiday accommodation and hotels, given we need to take a fair amount of specialist equipment for Adam when we travel. We looked long and hard at the alternatives available and finally, some two years ago, hit on the idea of a motor home by chance when we were unexpectedly diverted due to road works in Perth, Western Australia and saw a used Bedford motor home for sale in a front garden and decided to buy it.

We found we enjoyed the freedom of the motor home life and we could also take everything we needed for Adam, although the motor home was a little cramped when fully loaded. However, as Adam has grown older we found lifting him in and out of the motor home and folding the wheelchair up each time more taxing so we set about finding a motor home that would allow us to take Adam complete with his wheelchair. This proved quite a challenge as to have a new motor home built to meet these requirements was financially out of our reach, so our next choice was to look around to find a used motor home that could be adapted. Our main thought was it had to be large enough inside to cope with the wheelchair and not interfere with the integrity of the internal layout.

We had been looking for several months before we finally came across a Winnebago motor home that we believed could be modified by putting an extra door in the rear of the vehicle and was also suitable to fit a wheelchair hoist. However, the next challenge was to find a specialist to carry out the modifications and it was then that we hit a snag, as a number of the main repair workshops were reluctant to tackle this type of modification. However, by chance we came across a small caravan repair workshop, only a short distance from where we live, who agreed to do the work. The outcome has been outstanding as they managed to blend in the external appearance of the vehicle and retain the internal layout as originally provided and by a clever series of adaptations of the original furniture to create a pathway for the wheelchair to access the motor home and then allows the internal layout to revert back to its normal use.

The next step was to fit a hoist to the rear of the vehicle, which provided some engineering challenges, but another local company was well able to meet this challenge in fitting the hoist as well as retaining the tow bar for a trailer that we now use to transport the extra equipment we need for Adam.