Is this the end of “Blue Snoopy”?

 

Last year, “He” made a decision that our travelling in a caravan would come to an end with our last trip being our annual pilgrimage to the “Stone the Crows” festival in Wagga Wagga in April 2018. It was expected that our last night in the caravan would be at Macquarie Woods near Bathurst where we free camped for the last two nights of our return trip.

There were several reasons behind the decision to stop caravanning.

As we have written in this blog, our caravan has been damaged twice from hail, once whilst parked in our driveway when we were on our way to Tasmania in our ”other” car, the other time in June 2016 when we were staying in Alice Springs on our trip around Australia.

Also, until we purchased our caravan, we always thought that we live in a wide street.  The day we collected our caravan and returned home with it proved to us that we actually don’t live in a wide street at all.  Over the past six years, we have had to seek assistance from our neighbours to move vehicles parked in the street to allow us to take our caravan out. One neighbour is great and is always happy to help but unfortunately the same cannot be said of another neighbour in our “exit” path.  We can struggle if there are other cars parked that cannot be moved and unfortunately, there are several of those in our street from time to time.  We have similar problems when we return home and that relates specifically to the neighbour who is not willing to help.  If they park their car wide of the curb, we need to have another set of eyes to ensure we don’t hit their vehicle as we reverse the caravan into the drive.

We have been fortunate in that we have seen a lot of Australia.  We believe that the parts we have not seen are easily accessible by car and our plans were to use a car to visit these places and stay in cabins, hotels or hotels. In fact, after returning from “Stone the Crows”, with friends we headed to Western Australia taking our car with us on the Indian Pacific.  Our six week trip showed us that managing travel in the car is indeed very possible, however, there were limitations with this type of travel.

Last year we also purchased a replacement vehicle for our small Suzuki S-Cross with the intention that this vehicle would provide for our future travel requirements and also be capable of towing something up to 2T in weight.

Earlier this year we visited a caravan and camping show in Sydney with the specific purpose of identifying another RV should we decide to reverse our “stop caravanning” decision.  This was “Plan “B””.  We did actually see a small caravan that we felt could meet future requirement if needed and we had the opportunity of speaking with the owner of a similar caravan when we were in Western Australia.

Several days before we returned home from the west and having close to six weeks to think about the future, “He” came to the conclusion that we should still continue to caravan but the future would not include our Nova caravan.

During the week after arriving home from our trip, we decided to visit Sydney RV Centre at Penrith to see if we could live with the bed in the smaller caravan and also if other aspects of the caravan would suit our on-going needs.  The visit confirmed that the smaller caravan could meet our future needs so we negotiated the trade of our current caravan and the order of a new van. We expect delivery in late August or early September.

 

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