First big van test, Baja for Christmas.

In mid December we left Tucson for a trip to Baja. We got to the ferry in Topolabampo in one day and arrived in La Ventana Mexico before noon on the second day. We spent 3 weeks playing in Mexico before driving the long way around (no ferry) up the peninsula back to Tucson. If you don't want to read all of my rambling, the short version is that the van did really well on the trip. I expected to have a few minor, or maybe even a major problem with this being the first long range test. No problems to note, but a few improvements planned.


The van and trailer make a real dust storm on a dirt road.



We really didn't do any 4 wheeling, in fact I only locked the hubs in once on the whole trip. We did however go several places that we would not have gone without the 4x4.



Here we are arriving for some camping on the beach. Didn't need 4x4 here either, but wouldn't have been on the beach without it.




Improvements will include something in the rear to help with heavy loading. With the van fully loaded, the trailer tongue weight, and my 8 million pound bumper, the back end was sagging a bit. I really don't want to go with the air bag option because of the complications involved. I'm looking into putting in an extra leaf. I'll post what I end up doing.

The bump stops worked like a charm. We bottomed out once when a washout on the main road caught us off gaurd. It wasn't bad at all, the stops worked as advertised. I won't be changing a thing in this department.

The roads in Baja are not the best quality. They don't take the time to level properly which gives you a lot of up and down action in any car. The van never had any handling issues, but we sure did the tuna boat thing a lot. If the rear spring doesn't help, I'll look into more heavy duty shocks.

Lastly I wasn't impressed with the mileage we got. I'm going to call it an average of 11mpg for the whole trip. Best being 13 and worst 9. Once again those roads are a killer and towing the trailer doesn't help. Sure hope I do better around home without towing.




This video shows how narrow the roads are