The art of travelling backwards
It may be small, but reversing a caravan into an allotted parking space turns out to be much harder than it sounds.
As a newly created highway woman, I was looking forward to the amazing and diverse terrain of this fabulous whenua of ours. One sight that never ceases to catch my breath is the incredible maunga, Pohaturoa, the volcanic plug that rises beside the mighty Waikato Awa, where SH30 from Te Kuiti joins SH1.
Reminding me of the extraordinary Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Pohaturoa soars magnificently into the sky, regardless of commercial forestry doing its best to weigh his shoulders down with pines.
It rained all day, but there were some wonderful breaks in the weather when the sun blistered down on the rain-dropped world, making everything so vivid and vibrant.
I have an abiding memory of seeing new-leaved trees in Taihape. Great ‘‘rounds’’ of foliage on top of rain-darkened trunks, looking like pom-poms of iridescent green being waved by cheerleaders to welcome spring out to play.
The Desert Road was bleak and the wind started to gain a fair amount of beef as we came into Bulls, but I decided to go just a bit further to lessen the trip to the Bluebridge ferry the next day. So I went on to Foxton Beach, to the Top 10 Holiday Park.
Having never backed a caravan – never mind hardly having driven one forwards – I asked the receptionist if I could be given an easy space to get into. She said I could have my pick and was kind enough to offer to help me into a site that suited my limited back-warding abilities.
Thankfully, there were few other campers, but the two cyclists in the tent nearby had a most entertaining 10 minutes watching me make various attempts to wiggle my way into the chosen spot. Wiggle being the operative word. The thing about a wee caravan is that it has a short wheelbase, so it needs next to nothing to get it to head in the direction you want... but once you have it aiming in that general direction, you need to turn the steering wheel pretty tout de suite in order to straighten the caravan’s backward journey and deliver it with great aplomb into your allotted park. Oh, so marvellous in theory. In practice, not so much.
I quickly realised that if you don’t turn your steering wheel speedily enough, you can ‘‘argh!’’ all you like, the caravan will not straighten as hoped. Instead, it laughs uproariously and continues on its original trajectory.
Even in a field the size of a... well... a very large empty campground, I managed to get the caravan to basically turn on a sixpence and suddenly appear, gleefully, mere inches from my driver’s window. And, moments later, have it somehow pirouette (on yet another pesky sixpence) behind my truck, causing it to nigh-on knock on my passenger window with a saucy wink.
However, after much trial and error, and many stifled giggles from my audience, I managed to reverse my caravan in (sort of) a straight line by the power point and felt ever so chuffed with myself.
By now the weather had closed in, and though I had the four stabilisers down, the caravan shook in the wind, but I was so beat, I didn’t care. I turned my lounge into my boudoir (i.e. flipping the squabs of the two mini settees to become a wee mattress), plonked a pillow down, plonked myself down and promptly fell asleep.
Day one, done and dusted.
Caravan life, here I come.
When opera singer Helen Medlyn withdrew from performing, she threw caution to the wind, took out her savings and bought a little caravan and an SUV. She’s been on the road ever since, enjoying a mobile lifestyle.
I quickly realised that if you don’t turn your steering wheel speedily enough, you can ‘‘argh!’’ all you like, the caravan will not straighten as hoped.