Magna
Our current rig is a 2000 Country Coach Magna. We’ve been RVing since we bought our first travel trailer in 2014, and are on our fifth rig. We’ve been heavily modifying our rigs for boondocking since late 2019, and have gone through many iterations of trial and error to develop what we have today. In most ways, we consider it the perfect culmination for full-time RVing, but as with all rigs, everything has some drawbacks. The primary drawback with a 40′ motorhome is the sheer size, and limitations that come along with that. We tend to manage just fine, though. There are obviously some limitations compared to the truck camper we used to have, but we’ll eventually fill that gap with a secondary rig — not a primary one after living 11 months full time in one.
We spent many years whittling down the list of coaches we’d consider if we moved into a class A. In the end, we were only looking at 1998-2004 Country Coach Magna/Affinity and Foretravel U320 coaches, and possibly the odd Newell or Prevost. In February 2022, we made an offer and took delivery of this Magna, while boondocking in Quartzite, AZ. We left Phoenix at rush hour and arrived back at our spot after dark, where we performed our initial build, including the solar, in the course of a week. The construction and build quality of the Magna is the primary reason it made the top of our list… even as a twenty year old coach, very few coaches have been made since that we’d consider a better option for us.
To keep this page short, we’re going to break the build into sections, and each section will have its own page. The pages will cover the modifications we made that we kept, why we made them, and how they help to make this the ideal coach for us. Occasionally I’ll discuss previous iterations that we might also recommend, or consider mistakes and recommend against. Hopefully they will inspire you to make your rig work better for you in some way, as we were inspired to make ours work best for us. At the end of the day, this is our house, and we invest in making our house our home, just as you would a sticks and bricks.
As a final note, we try to spend about half the year boondocking and the other half in parks. Specifically, we have a Thousand Trails Adventure membership, that we highly recommend considering if you are looking to travel full-time. Between the TT/Encore/RPI membership, and the rig that is setup to provide a near full hookup experience when off the grid, we rarely shell out additional money for camping.