We had planned to leave on Tuesday, but Sydney experience a “one in 100 years” rain event. The NSW Police force asked for drivers not to venture onto the road unless they needed to. We decided to wait for the rain event to finish and leave on the following day.
Since collecting the caravan last week, we had spent a couple of days loading the caravan and as part of that process, culling some of the items that we had carried in the Nova.
We arrived at Budgewoi close to 11am and stopped at the location of our Saturday function, the Halekulani Bowling Club. Just before arriving at the club, we went over a speed hump a little quicker than usual and shortly afterwards we would see the results of that with many things in the caravan now on the door.
We were a day late arriving at the caravan park but due to the weather event yesterday, they did not charge us for the missed booking.
After paying our fees for the next five nights, we were soon in a position to reverse the caravan onto our camping site. The positioning of the caravan was achieved easily, and it didn’t take long to unhitch and do our new setup routine.
Part of the setup process was the raising of our new inflatable annexe. Unfortunately, this took about an hour when it should have taken 15 minutes. The fact that we had a short shower didn’t help nor did the fact that we had been given a camp site with a permanent ground sheet. Nevertheless, we did raise the annexe and were surprised with the amount of additional space we have. We will be selective as to when we use the annexe as we will not be using it for one or two night stays.
Later in the day we discovered that the water would not flow quickly from our sink and that coincided with being told there was a slow drip coming from under the van. Soon we discovered that the caravan has three separate drain points rather than the two we were told during the delivery process. Fortunately, we had a third hose, so the problem was solved quickly.
We did a quick shop at the local Coles purchasing the items we decided not to carry from Sydney. Our evening meal was chicken and salad.
We spent the remainder of the day greeting other members of our group and organising the formal “sign-on” and collection of various monies. The group enjoyed happy hour in a vacant site adjacent to our camp site as the intended happy hour area was still wet from yesterday’s rain. No one was interested in playing games.
We had our evening meal in the annexe and retired early to bed. The next part of the transition to the new caravan was about to happen, how would we sleep in a bed with a cut-out and a mattress that was unknown to us?