After 300 nights and 65.000 km in our two completely different Californias we’d like to share our experiences with fellow Cali-fans.
A short intro. We are an Anglo-Dutch couple of 65 and 70. We abandoned our native countries over 30 years ago and never looked back, enjoying a happy and quiet life in rural France. In the nineties and early noughties we travelled a lot. We spent many winter months in our Defender playing in the Sahara sands (mostly Mauritania) and visiting countries that are now out of bounds, such as Libya and Mali. When not in the desert we travelled across Europe, from Wales to Greece, from Lapland to Sicily. After a seven year travel break we decided to hit the road again and bought our first California in 2014, a Beach called Betsy. Three years later we traded her in for a Coast, appropriately called Betsy 2.0. What made us take those decisions?
Top: Betsy the Beach. Bottom: Betsy 2.0 the Coast. Both are Californias but totally different!
Our Beach was the bog standard version (140, manual, 2WD) with the parking heater and awning as the main extras. We chose the Beach because it came as close as possible to “real” camping. We didn’t anticipate indoor cooking, so we built our custom pull-out cooking and storage system, using drawers made with crates (see How we dressed up Betsy if you’re looking for ideas about kitting out your Beach). That worked fine - as long as the weather was clement. Soon we found out that off-season camping could be a pain, being forced to go around the back of the van to extricate anything that didn’t fit in the tiny drawers under the 3-seat bench. And cooking outside was impossible in strong winds, pouring rain and near-freezing temperatures.
Did we buy the wrong Beach? Probably. Since we hardly ever have passengers (and never cover long distances if we do) we would have been better off with the 2-seater Beach. This version would have given us more storage space inside (the floor-mounted storage units use the same floor space as the wardrobe/kitchen unit in the Ocean and Coast) plus the large drawer under the bench. And we would still have had the same 150cm wide bed. Other advantages of the 2-seater bed over the 3-seater version is that the bed is lower, so you can sit up in it, even when the roof is down, and the bed is flatter, so you can have a less thick mattress, taking up a lot less space.
And then came the Coast. After 2 years we decided to say farewell to our Beach and switch to a more comfortable California which would allow us to do everything inside, including the cooking. By then VW had introduced the Coast which you can see either as a “poor man’s Ocean” or an “Ocean without the nonsense”. The waiting time was nearly a year, so when the new van arrived we looked back at 3 years, 210 nights and 45.000km in our Beach.
Our Coast is the French version, which differs from the same model in most European countries in that it comes with an electric roof and parking heater as standard features. Both were a must for us; the electric roof because my wife (who is shorter than me and doesn’t have a lot of strength in her arms) had great difficulty pulling the roof down in our Beach; the parking heater because we use our Cali all year round. In addition we took the awning, and the radio/media player that lets us connect our mobile phone to the dashboard screen, via App Connect. The other main features were 4Motion combined with the DSG7, a choice we’ve never regretted.
It took us a while to get used to the much narrower bed (from 150cm in the Beach to 114cm in the Coast makes a big difference), I admit there were (and sometimes still are) some territorial disputes but overall we manage and sleep extremely well in our Cali. (We never sleep upstairs.)
The main reason for choosing the Coast was to have all the kit we need inside the van, plus the ability to cook inside when the weather isn’t very friendly. We aren’t afraid of cooking odours, so we have our B&E in the morning and our curries and steaks in the evening, all cooked indoors. That said, we also have a Cadac which we use for cooking outdoors whenever we can.
Also very important for us that we have water on board, so we can wash ourselves and brush our teeth without leaving the van.
It’s really amazing how much clever storage space the Coast/Ocean has. Since we’re only the two of us, we can carry a week’s clothing, shoes and heavy coats onboard, and still have space for all our cooking and eating gear.
Everything that we don’t need on a daily basis lives in the back of the van, in Euro crates resting on the (now very popular) boot drawer.
We’re now 18 months down the road in our Coast, with 20,000km and nearly 100 nights camping behind us. Wherever we can we camp “wild”, except when we spend a month in Spain in January/February every year. In view of our age we don’t do long international journeys anymore. Fortunately we live in France, a big country where there’s enough beauty to discover in the years that we (hopefully) still have left.
We had great fun with our Beach but have no regrets that we switched to our Coast!
A short intro. We are an Anglo-Dutch couple of 65 and 70. We abandoned our native countries over 30 years ago and never looked back, enjoying a happy and quiet life in rural France. In the nineties and early noughties we travelled a lot. We spent many winter months in our Defender playing in the Sahara sands (mostly Mauritania) and visiting countries that are now out of bounds, such as Libya and Mali. When not in the desert we travelled across Europe, from Wales to Greece, from Lapland to Sicily. After a seven year travel break we decided to hit the road again and bought our first California in 2014, a Beach called Betsy. Three years later we traded her in for a Coast, appropriately called Betsy 2.0. What made us take those decisions?
Top: Betsy the Beach. Bottom: Betsy 2.0 the Coast. Both are Californias but totally different!
Our Beach was the bog standard version (140, manual, 2WD) with the parking heater and awning as the main extras. We chose the Beach because it came as close as possible to “real” camping. We didn’t anticipate indoor cooking, so we built our custom pull-out cooking and storage system, using drawers made with crates (see How we dressed up Betsy if you’re looking for ideas about kitting out your Beach). That worked fine - as long as the weather was clement. Soon we found out that off-season camping could be a pain, being forced to go around the back of the van to extricate anything that didn’t fit in the tiny drawers under the 3-seat bench. And cooking outside was impossible in strong winds, pouring rain and near-freezing temperatures.
Did we buy the wrong Beach? Probably. Since we hardly ever have passengers (and never cover long distances if we do) we would have been better off with the 2-seater Beach. This version would have given us more storage space inside (the floor-mounted storage units use the same floor space as the wardrobe/kitchen unit in the Ocean and Coast) plus the large drawer under the bench. And we would still have had the same 150cm wide bed. Other advantages of the 2-seater bed over the 3-seater version is that the bed is lower, so you can sit up in it, even when the roof is down, and the bed is flatter, so you can have a less thick mattress, taking up a lot less space.
And then came the Coast. After 2 years we decided to say farewell to our Beach and switch to a more comfortable California which would allow us to do everything inside, including the cooking. By then VW had introduced the Coast which you can see either as a “poor man’s Ocean” or an “Ocean without the nonsense”. The waiting time was nearly a year, so when the new van arrived we looked back at 3 years, 210 nights and 45.000km in our Beach.
Our Coast is the French version, which differs from the same model in most European countries in that it comes with an electric roof and parking heater as standard features. Both were a must for us; the electric roof because my wife (who is shorter than me and doesn’t have a lot of strength in her arms) had great difficulty pulling the roof down in our Beach; the parking heater because we use our Cali all year round. In addition we took the awning, and the radio/media player that lets us connect our mobile phone to the dashboard screen, via App Connect. The other main features were 4Motion combined with the DSG7, a choice we’ve never regretted.
It took us a while to get used to the much narrower bed (from 150cm in the Beach to 114cm in the Coast makes a big difference), I admit there were (and sometimes still are) some territorial disputes but overall we manage and sleep extremely well in our Cali. (We never sleep upstairs.)
The main reason for choosing the Coast was to have all the kit we need inside the van, plus the ability to cook inside when the weather isn’t very friendly. We aren’t afraid of cooking odours, so we have our B&E in the morning and our curries and steaks in the evening, all cooked indoors. That said, we also have a Cadac which we use for cooking outdoors whenever we can.
Also very important for us that we have water on board, so we can wash ourselves and brush our teeth without leaving the van.
It’s really amazing how much clever storage space the Coast/Ocean has. Since we’re only the two of us, we can carry a week’s clothing, shoes and heavy coats onboard, and still have space for all our cooking and eating gear.
Everything that we don’t need on a daily basis lives in the back of the van, in Euro crates resting on the (now very popular) boot drawer.
We’re now 18 months down the road in our Coast, with 20,000km and nearly 100 nights camping behind us. Wherever we can we camp “wild”, except when we spend a month in Spain in January/February every year. In view of our age we don’t do long international journeys anymore. Fortunately we live in France, a big country where there’s enough beauty to discover in the years that we (hopefully) still have left.
We had great fun with our Beach but have no regrets that we switched to our Coast!
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