As we travel from caravan park to caravan park, I'm sure at least 3 of you are saying "But we have no idea of how you are living from day to day". You sad gits. Nevertheless, I shall explain.
A typical arrival in a caravan park involves going to reception, dealing with the (typically) old woman behind the counter, who is often surprised at the fact that people have come to her. She will spend a while composing herself, then furnish us with a piece of grass (more often dirt, dust or sand) upon which we can rest our weary heads.
Then comes the hard part. Is it cold enough to stay in the car, or do we have to put the tent up? Also, how lazy are we feeling?
The tent option - there are several benefits to sleeping in the tent, most of which involve the comfort of my spine. The airbed is a godsend, and the fact that for some reason Cat gets stuck with inflating it 9 times out of 10 is not lost on me. Putting up the tent can be a bit tricky, not least because the wind in Australia is following us around. It only really picks up when we are putting up or dismantling the tent, because nature is evil and must be destroyed. Sleeping in the tent also makes it easier to get up and pee in the middle of the night, unless you are Cat, in which case that particular journey will always be across the airbed and my head, both of which are soft and giving at midnight.
The car - we only started sleeping in the car when we realised that Australia is in fact the coldest place in the universe. Out of sheer desperation, we have got this down to something of a fine art. All the stuff from the boot and back seat are arranged in perfect order on the front seats, leaving just the two large suitcases in the back. These are arranged along the centre of the car, forming a T-shape with the backs of the front seats. We then sleep either side of the cases, rather like one of those Japanese capsule hotels. Only much crapper. We sleep with heads at the rear of the car, as the folding seats have really unpleasant metal ridges on the back. As a testament to the genius of Ford, I can stretch out full length in a Ford Falcon with my feet just touching the back of the front seat. Take that, dwarves.
For privacy, a crap engineer (me) has rigged the inside of the car with a series of cheap curtain hooks screwed into the cardboard lining of the roof, which enables us to hook bedsheets over the hooks, thereby providing curtains. Each bedsheet has carefully positioned holes with blue ink scrawled around them so we can find them next time we hook them up. The hooks are held in place by fear, prayer and sorcery, though they can fall down in the event of any of the following:
Shifting one iota in bed; heavy gale; light gale; no gale; light breeze; passing animal; passing insect; solar flares; sneezing; coughing; breathing; death; hard stare; soft stare; mention of the word 'cucumber'; butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia; statement from the Prime Minister defending the state of the British economy.
Each falling of the bedsheet is followed by me using words I cannot repeat in case my Nan is reading this. Then I crawl to the front of the car (a very tricky proposition - it may be long enough, but there's no wriggle room at all, and the roof is 3 inches above the bed) and start to try and cram the hook back into its makeshift hole. This always fails, and inevitably I have to get out and reposition everything. You can imagine how much fun it is going to the loo in the middle of the night. And the less said about getting into PJs each night the better. It is a horrifying experience, filled with wailing and a strange grating noise.
In addition to other curtainy problems, the rear curtain is actually just slammed in the door,the loose ends actually hanging outside of the car, no matter how much we play with them. Which proved something of a problem in Fremantle where the weather was so foul that water starting soaking its way down the sheet and onto one of my pillows. Then onto the fabric lining of the boot, and then into the wood underneath, which is nature's way of telling you that you should go north and find warmth.
And though your body eventually gets used to sleeping on metal and cardboard, it is not the most comfortable of surfaces, and after our trip both of us will require Six Million Dollar Man-type surgery to repair us. Furthermore, we are also sleeping on the cardboard cover over the spare wheel. Which gradually sags. And since it also appears to have sagged when previous owners have kipped in the back, someone has put a cheap piece of plywood over half of the space over the tyre. Which Cat did not find amusing when the plywood shifted and she found herself sinking into a plywood-induced side-on foetal shape for two nights in Fremantle when the weather was so terrible we didn't dare open the back to sort out the wood.
Dinner in the caravan park will usually be made in the camp kitchen, which all being well will include a stove, kettle and microwave, and most importantly a fridge. Several do not include these things (some don't even have walls, for crying out loud), which makes me fear the owners of these parks - just what exactly do you have in your kitchen at home, you freaks?
Sometimes there is a TV room, and with luck it is empty and can receive more than one channel. The one constant we have found travelling Australia is that every caravan park dweller loves 'Top Gear'. Loves it. Except for that time when Jeremy Clarkson and Co were taking the piss out of Australia for producing no cars at all. Then there was silence, punctuated only by the sound of me laughing and running away at the same time. The other constant of TV rooms, is that Australia has unquestionably the worst TV in the universe. THE UNIVERSE. I kid you not. 'Celebrity Singing Bee'? 'Battle of the Choirs'? You'd think people were still being sent here as punishment for all the torture they dish up.
If there is no TV room, we are left with two camp chairs and a table. And books. Books are the lifeblood of the traveller, and we charge headlong through tomes at a rate of knots. So wary am I of not having reading material, that I nabbed a Tom Clancy novel from one park. I'm not proud, but it was for emergencies, and it took 4 days to plough through the 1000 pages of military and political mumbo jumbo - with no TV, you can get through a hell of a lot of literature. Australians meet this challenge by making books as expensive as possible. New books are ridiculous; secondhand books are as expensive as new books in the UK. We tend to do book swaps at the caravan parks, but you always run the risk of being hit by a tidal wave of Mills and Boon, though I must confess I was fascinated to find out what 'The 200% Wife' was all about. Alas, I couldn't sum up the courage to remove it from the shelf (actually I could barely stare at it without getting a migraine, such was its other-wordly power).
Bed is normally before 10pm - hey, it's dark, what the hell else can we do, there's no money for booze. But then you can sleep in until 7.30 or 8 in the morning, maybe a little later if you're not leaving the next day. So you get a lot of sleep. Unless you're in Fremantle, when the 100kph winds and monsoon rains have a habit of waking you all night, even in the car. Or in Broome, where the gales fold your tent down on top of you, and you find yourself being smothered by some canvassy assailant at 3am.
Breakfast is usually cereal (Weet-Bix - for some reason the 'a' has disappeared from this particular cereal, possibly stolen when the continent was still a penal colony), a banana, and the ubiquitous Nutella on toast. Good campsites have a little boiler that produces instant boiling water. By this standard, there are 3 good campsites in Australia. Oh, and I would kill every man, woman and child in this country for a cup of tea that actually tastes like a cup of tea. Just for the record.
The packing up of the tent is a painful and always damp process (not damp through excitement, you understand - merely through condensation). The repacking of the car a drier but still irritating process. Ya know, it would probably have been easier to stay at home. This travelling business is hard work for a miserable grump such as myself.
