Coffee and Campervans

How do you coffee while campervanning? The stove top espresso maker has always been my “go to” for our trips at home in Australia but a trip to Walmart and a search through all the shelves only discovered percolator after percolator. What's a girl to do?


If you are tea drinker you can move right along, this article does not concern you.

On a recent trip to the states my family and I hired a motorhome and headed out of Vegas to explore some fabulous national parks. I had been warned by Aussie ex pat friends that coffee to the standard I had become accustomed to would be hard to find. I thought maybe tea was an option and then I was advised that most Americans don’t own a kettle, they just put a cup in the microwave. What the!!

I was however, pleasantly surprised that our motorhome came equipped with a stove top kettle. I bought myself some yummy teas and we headed off on our adventure. It turns our however that the relaxing non-coffee requiring holiday I had pictured was not to be. Sharing a bed with a 3-year-old with a nasty cough meant we all woke up (if indeed we slept) bleary eyed and tad cranky and coffee was an absolute necessity.

We were still not too far from coffee shops at this point, so we popped in to get a coffee. After some blank looks when asking for a take away my hubby reminded me that the correct phrase is “to go”. The coffee board said they had my coffee choice which is macchiato, I thought that was a good omen. My usual issue with a macchiato is between Melbourne and Sydney were Melbourne tends towards the long and Sydney the short, but this is just about the amount of liquid nothing to do with the dash of frothy milk that makes a macchiato the bees knees to me. Once I received my coffee, I thought ok this feels about the right heaviness for a macchiato, its just in a giant cup. I opened it up to add my 1/4 teaspoon of sugar (don’t mock me, I just like a dash) and discovered something I did not even know was possible lurking in my cup. I kid you not it, my cup consisted of the requisite shot of coffee and was then covered by foam to the brim! I am not talking the usual creamy frothy milk foam, I am talking this looks like the stuff in my daughter’s bubble bath foam. A good scraping away of the foam left me with a passable expresso and I bit of research has left me with way too much knowledge I never knew I needed about macrofoam and microfoam.

A trip to Walmart, a search through all the shelves only discover percolator after percolator, starting to feel a little dejected then bam a stove top espresso maker is found and bought, and our holiday headed back on track.

The stove top espresso maker has always been my “go to” for our trips back home in Australia. We often free camp and head away from towns so have no access to power or shops and being stove top means no matter where we are, as long as we have remembered the coffee we can usually keep my morning crankiness at bay. My sister on the other hand stays in more powered sites and therefore takes a small Nespresso with her which is I guess technically glampavanning!

How do you coffee while campervanning?