Subtitle: Do you call that a road?

Apr 2024

I recently read an article by someone complaining about the boredom of retirement and no longer having the chance to learn new things. If you are a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that this really got my goat up!

One of the big surprises of retirement and spending time on the road has been the things that we’ve learned. Not just about caravans and towing. We had to learn that very quickly, and we are still learning eleven years or so after buying our first van. But other stuff too.

Stuff, like navigation and geography, weather and climate, geology, biology, history, agriculture, arts, and culture to name a few.

Now onto Planning, Plotting & Project Management…

Having sorted the rig out it’s time to think about where to go and that involves the ‘P’ word, planning. That’s where the WikiCamps app has made planning and finding campsites much easier, but it doesn’t allow for climate, sorry meteorological, issues. The more experienced you become you’ll realise that any sort of camping gets miserable in wet weather and the weather in Tasmania may be cold but it’s nowhere near as wet as it is up north. Up there they’ll get more rain in a passing shower than Melbourne or Adelaide gets in a year. The recent Cyclone Jasper dropped 870mm on one Queensland town alone. So, you’ll have to watch the weather with the sharp eye of a sea captain and plan to outrun it, like a headless chook, often.

In the Southern states, most of our weather comes from the west. That’s just how it works. Nice and easy. But in other places, blimey it can come in from all directions and sometimes not those that are forecast either, like the time Woody had a gallstone attack on our yacht on Sydney harbour during a Southerly Buster. We won’t go there, that’s a story for another day. Caravanning though is a lot like yachting which probably explains why there are so many old yachties in our caravan club who love living in small often unlevel spaces dealing with the elements. However, sailors don’t have to put up with lonely emus or kangaroos bouncing into the walls at night.

Yeah, I know, I digressed a bit from planning and this is where the geography and terrain come in and these are dictated by the type of caravan you have, on road, off road (the words ‘Off Road’ on the cool looking sticker on your van don’t necessarily mean that you can actually go bush you know, but you’ll probably just have a bit more clearance underneath to get out of steep suburban driveways), pop top, campervan, camper trailer, roof top camper etc.

We’ve pretty well chosen to stay on the tarmac for most of our travels and still, there are thousands of fascinating places that we’ll never get the chance to see. These days we tend to just choose somewhere that we might not have been and head off. With one eye on the weather, of course, oh, and fires and floods.

Is it any wonder that we’re busy when on the road? Anyway, I guess that’s where navigation and geography come in…