Prius Camping

I'm just doing a little road trip at the moment. It's a couple of thousand km with quite a few mountains, so I'm giving the Prius a pretty good workout.

Been using "B" mode down a lot of the moutain passes with the SOC pegged at 8 bars and the engine screaming at what sounds like about max revs (as an engine brake). It seems to be handling it pk though, still averaging about 55 MPG (4.2 L/100km) for the trip.

I've been taking the scenic route and doing some camping along the way. Slept overnight in the back of the Prius one time. For those of us that like to see Prius in nice wild settings, I'll post a few pics when I get home. (I'm on a tiny android tablet at the moment and I can't resize pics very efffectively, also excuse any typos).

 

Thanks for the tips PriusCamper.

Yeah the battery is still holding up ok despite the occasional SOC "undershoot" problem that both of us have mentioned experiencing in the past. I now try to reduce the amount of times my SOC maxes out to 8 bars by using "B" mode, but I often forget and it still gets maxed out quite a bit. On this trip I had a lot of mountain passes and used a lot of B mode in descents. I only had one really low SOC undershoot climbing up out of a large valley after a equally large descent to a "punt" (ferry) river crossing. I'll post some pictures of it in a minute when I finish resizing and uploading.

 

I just got back last night so as promised I'll post a few Prius Camping photos. I've enjoyed looking at other people's Prius camping pictures here before, so I figured this time I'd take a few snaps along the way and return the favor.

Sorry about the poor quality of some of the images, but I didn't bring a proper camera. I only had the *very* ordinary one that is built into my cheap little andriod tablet, so these are definitely just "happy snaps". I could have taken a lot more wildlife photos in particular if I had have taken a decent camera with me.

This (below) is where we slept in the back of the Prius on the first night. It wasn't an official "rest area" so we weren't really supposed to camp there. I wasn't planning to sleep in the Prius so I didn't even have anything to block the windows for privacy, but it turned out that this was such a quite little town that nobody even disturbed us. I was pretty tired from driving, so after I woke at dawn I threw a T-shirt over my eyes and slept like a baby until about 9 am. My wife said that in the whole morning just one guy walked past - to go fishing out on the point. This was really a beautiful spot.


The spot below is just around the corner (a hundred yards or so) from where we slept. We made some breakfast/lunch here and had a swim.



Below is where we set up our first "proper" camp site. Notice the new tailgate ornament that we got almost as soon as we set up camp. That little guy was as bold as brass in letting us know that any food scraps we had (especially meat) were for him.



Ok, I was going to only post "prius" photos, but here is a little Rock-wallaby, Rock-wallaby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, that hopped out just behind our tent in the morning.



Less shy and much more commonly seen than the Rock-wallaby is the Eastern grey kangaroo, Eastern grey kangaroo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. At places like campsites these guys get pretty used to humans, and are often very easy to approach. At least I managed to get the Prius in the background of this shot, so I can stay true to the topic of the forum.



For a final picture, here is one of the climbs/descents that the Prius had to struggle with. There were much bigger ones, but I snapped this one because it was so picturesque.