When I embarked on my first adventure pulling a 2.5 ton caravan behind my shiny new Toyota Prado 4 Wheel Drive, I knew Jack about caravans. He had just picked it up, all 7 meters, in a Geelong sales yard.
It was raining a lot. Dressed in my usual shorts, polo shirt, good quality thongs, with my Canadian Tilley hat, Tag-Heuer dive watch, and usual positive attitude, I held an umbrella over the head of an employee who patiently showed me how to hitch up the trailer. . to the meadow. It was already saturated, but I felt that I should at least make an effort to keep it dry.
On the way to a trailer park just three or six miles away, I struggled with heavy Friday afternoon traffic, went over a bridge under renovation that seemed too narrow for my RV, but finally made it to the trailer park. one-piece rollers. I thought I should have put up a big sign that said, “Caution. Rookie towing a camper.”
Fate and good driving kept me in good standing. All he had to do now was survive eight weeks of driving through the beautiful state of Victoria. With my trailer’s license plate number displaying the caption, “Victoria, the place to be,” it seemed like I’d made the right decision. Not too far to travel from my home in Alice Springs if the new camper had a warranty issue.
By the end of the eight weeks, I had decided that there are two main types of people one meets in trailer parks, the person:
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who can’t help but (usually men) tell you how much better all the equipment they have in their caravan is than yours
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who has retired from the workforce but can’t shake the notion of how important he or she was before retirement. He once he was a rooster but now he’s just a duster
One of the first places I stopped at, I can’t remember where I was now, we had barely parked our truck and this guy showed up wearing what we call a “giggle hat” in the military, more commonly known as a bucket hat. Well, he had to tell me that he had the xyz type widget for his van and he 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 for an RV.
Then it was the abc widget – I should have gotten one of those. It went on like that until finally I told him I had to set up my caravan, which should have been obvious to any 10 year old, and he left us alone. If I hadn’t, I probably would have addressed him in an unusually rude way.
A few days later I met the man who had been so important, if he had lived in Perth he would probably have heard of him. He had to tell me how he had been CEO of one of the largest IT companies in Australia. He also had a single-engine plane that he had bought in a kit from the US and assembled it all himself. He also had to tell me about his expensive Breitling pilot’s watch.
He seemed like a nice person, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t give a damn what he’d been. I didn’t tell him about my collection of tertiary qualifications and that he had been a big shot in an educational institution, a high civil servant in not one, but two governments. To me, all of that is meaningless now, just a means of surviving for 50 odd years.
I’m just a retiree who enjoys being nothing more than a grizzled nomad who gets up every day and decides what he wants to do to fill the hours he has left. It is a great stage of life and allows a lot of traveling. Complete freedom. Living the dream!
Now when I meet these guys, I just let them talk until they run out of things to say. If you ask me what I did before I retired, I’ll tell you the truth: I worked in a high-security facility 15 miles west of Alice Springs, and my job was so secret I didn’t even know what I was doing. That usually shuts them up.
I am happy to be a duster.