What’s On This Weekend?

News

19 Aug

Stephen’s got it sorted in his Isuzu NLR with the trimmings

Even if retirement is still a distance dream, it’s not hard to imagine how you might fill your newly cleared schedule… lazy days at the pool, activities with the grandkids, hobbies and pot-and-parma lunch specials (or parmy – depending on which university you attended). Not a bad life if you’re keen on taking it easy.

But for those like Stephen Larissey from Tasmania, the wanderlust and itchy feet never quite go away, and there’s always time for another adventure.

“I’ve worked a lot of jobs,” recalled Stephen. “My parents owned the largest bus service in the state at the time, Tassie Redline, but after my father passed, I moved around. Towards the end of my career I was lucky enough to find myself working for a great boss but unfortunately, he died suddenly. That’s when I thought, well, I had better retire before it’s too late, so I packed it in at 61.”

**Stephen, smiling at what the future holds**

It’s clearly tough to give up the mindset of having lots on the go, and for a bloke like Stephen who has energy to spare, it means his pace of life hasn’t slowed down one bit.

“There’s always something going on at the house,” he says. “I’ve got a pair of beautiful young dogs, so I’ve just put in a big fence which needed a lot of building equipment and concrete.

“I’ve had utes for years but I’m pretty tall and the cab of the ute just wasn’t comfortable anymore, so I went looking for a replacement. There were the obvious 4-Wheel Drives, but that would have meant buying a caravan as we wanted to do a bit of travelling. Hooking up, unhooking. No – we didn’t want all the hassle.

“So I upgraded to an Isuzu truck. I feel like in the truck I can drive 600 kilometres in a day and not feel at all uncomfortable or tired.”

Jobs around the house are not the only thing Stephen has been roping his light-duty Isuzu truck into. With those travel plans in mind he recently purchased an impressive Palomino slide-on camper with the intention of seeing as much of Australia’s gorgeous and dramatic landscape as possible. (You can click on the Palomino link to find out more about their products).

“We were never able to do the kind of travel we wanted to in the Ute. The truck has a 3.2-metre-long tray and a payload that can carry anything I could possibly need without having to worry about weight limits.”

Stephen’s new camper is a serious piece of kit, well deserving of a great rig to match and he’s polished the truck-and-camper outfit with pride.

However, for the lifelong outdoorsman, the cherry on top of his new truck purchase is the capacity to simultaneously tow a fishing boat by the name of ‘Just Chips’.

“That’s what you say when you didn’t catch anything, you go home with just chips… and that’s the story most of the time you fish!” laughs Stephen. “The boat gets towed behind the truck, and then the camper goes straight on the back tray.

“When everything is loaded, it's all good, it's safe, secure, within weight limits and we can go anywhere we want to go. When I wanted to ditch the ute, I went to Bevan Coleman at Webster Trucks, and he was just the nicest person in the world to deal with. I told him about the camper and the trips, and he pointed us to the truck I needed and it’s perfect for the job.”

The truck in question is an Isuzu NLR 45-150, which comes with that 3.2-metre tray length and a design that just happens to be perfect for housing a slide-on camper.

Although you might expect to find a truck like the NLR on a worksite most days, it’s also well suited to camping applications, with a turning circle and cab-over engine compactness that makes it manoeuvrable in awkward spots.

The Isuzu NLR 45-150 has plenty of pulling power too, boasting a Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM) of 4.5 tonnes. This means Stephen has no issue towing anything he wants, from the camper, the boat or equipment and supplies for any of the endless jobs he has going on at the house.

Another major advantage is that despite their payload capacity, these models can be driven on a car licence, so Stephen won’t have to be the sole driver on long trips if he feels like a break.

With so much territory to cover on Stephen’s bucket list, it was also important for him to get a truck that was versatile enough to handle different ground conditions and with enough power to pull him out of any potentially sticky situations.

Stephen’s superb set up will be getting somewhat of a baptism by fire on an upcoming interstate journey from Tasmania and across ‘The Paddock’ to Perth, so the NLR will certainly need to live up to Isuzu’s reputation of reliability. The Outback is certainly one way to ‘baptise’ it.

Stephen won’t be heading off alone, being joined by his partner, Vicki, and their dogs Belle and Bob.

“The camper has a shower, toilet, washing facility, air conditioning, camp stove inside and outside, 170 litres of water on it, and it's even got a solar panel on the roof.

“We already do a lot of camping around Tassie, and we found all those little spots that we never went to before, the truck can just get us in anywhere we need it to, it’s going to be amazing.”

First up for Stephen and Vicki are several family visits with a stop-off to son, Tom, who owns the highly regarded 106 Auto Sales in Launceston. (If you’re in Tassie and in the market for a car, you can click on the highlighted link and tell Tom that his Old Man sent you).

Then it’s a trip across the Tasman Sea on the Spirit of Tasmania to be reunited with his other son, James, who lives in Perth working as a marine engineer, and for a holiday on the west coast.

With plans already taking shape for a trip up the east coast of Australia and blueprints being drawn for an eventual drive to Darwin, this is sure not to be the last of many adventures— Stephen, Vicki, Belle, Bob and their Isuzu truck are just getting started.