When I set out on my first adventure pulling a 2.5-tonne caravan behind my shiny new, Toyota Prado four-wheel drive, I knew very little about caravans. I’d just picked it up – all seven metres of it – at a Geelong sales yard.
It was raining heavily. Dressed in my usual shorts, polo shirt, good-quality thongs, wearing my Canadian Tilley hat, my Tag Heuer diving watch and usual positive outlook, I held an umbrella over the head of an employee who patiently showed me how to hitch the caravan to the Prado. He was already saturated, but I felt as though I should at least be making an effort to keep him dry.
On the drive to a caravan park only five or six kilometres away, I struggled through heavy Friday afternoon traffic and travelled over a bridge undergoing a revamp that looked too narrow for my caravan, before eventually arriving at the caravan park in one piece. I thought I should have displayed a large sign that said, ‘Caution. Newbie towing caravan’.
Fate and good driving proved useful. All I had to do was survive eight weeks driving around the lovely state of Victoria. With my caravan displaying the byline, ‘Victoria, the place to be’, it seemed like I had made the right choice. Not as far to travel from my home at Alice Springs if the new caravan suffered a warranty issue.
By the end of the eight weeks, I had decided there are two main types of people one meets in caravan parks. The first is the person who can’t help himself (usually men) from telling you how much better all the gear they have on their caravan is than yours. The second are those (again, usually men) who have retired from the workforce but cannot cast off the notion of how very important they had been before retirement. He was once a rooster, but now is just a feather duster.
We had no sooner parked our van at one of our first stops when this fellow turned up wearing what we in the military called a ‘giggle hat’, more commonly known as a bucket hat. He had to tell me that he had the ‘xyz type widget’ for his van and had noticed that I had the inferior ‘zyx widget’ on mine. It was just what I wanted to hear a few days after shelling out $50,000 or so for a caravan.
Next, it was the ‘abc widget’ – I should have got one of those. It went on until I eventually told him that I had to set up my caravan, which should have been obvious to any 10-year-old – and he left us alone. Had he not, I probably would have addressed him in an uncharacteristically rude manner.
A few days later I met the man who had been so important, if I had lived in Perth, I probably would have heard of him. He had to tell me how he had been the chief executive officer of one of Australia’s largest IT companies. He had also single-handedly assembled his kit single-engine airplane, purchased in the United States, of course. Then there was the detailed story about his expensive Breitling pilot’s watch.
He seemed like a nice person so I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t give a brass razoo what he had been. I didn’t tell him about my collection of tertiary qualifications and that I had been a big shot in an educational institution, a senior public servant in not one, but two governments. To me, all that is now meaningless, just a means of surviving for 50-odd years in the workforce to get to retirement.
I’m just a retiree who enjoys not being anything but a greying nomad who gets up each day and decides what he wants to do to fill in what hours he has left. It’s a great stage of life and allows one to travel extensively. Complete freedom.
Now when I meet these types, I simply let them rabbit on until they run out of something to say. If they ask me what I did before I retired, I tell them the truth: I worked at a high-security facility 25km west of Alice Springs and my job was so secret even I didn’t know what I was doing. That usually shuts them up.