Our last trip in the caravan was November last year and that was to a branch function of our ACC Branch. Today we would be joining other branch members for our first muster in 2025 at the seaside location of Foster / Tuncurry. This trip would also be the furthest north on the NSW coast that we have travelled in an RV.
Our packing for the trip went surprising well bearing in mind it was almost 5 months since we had used the caravan. With a high number of parked cars in our street that would have impacted our departure, we were lucky that a neighbour came to his car at the time we were leaving, and he was happy to relocate his car to make our extraction from the drive easier. It was unfortunate we departed in the wrong direction, but it didn’t take long to drive to our chosen route.
We decided to pay tolls and travelled on the M2 from North Ryde to Pennant Hills where we travelled in the tunnel that eventually connected with the M1 motorway.
Other than traffic at Raymond Terrace due to roadworks, our trip to our destination was uneventful. We had left home just after 9:00am and including a stop during the trip, we arrived at our destination around 1:20pm. Our computer had indicated that the travel time was around 3h 47minutes so we were happy with just over an hour. During the drive north, our Nissan Navara clocked 111,111 kilometers on the odometer.
Our venue was the NRMA Forster Tuncurry Holiday Park. After we did our check-in, we were asked to drive to our site, unhitch and then wait for a staff member with a tractor to arrive and place our caravan onto our site. This was done without any fuss and within a couple of minutes, the caravan was on our site and level. We had a problem with the opening of the caravan boot that eventually opened with some juggling of the lock. Later we would discover that a dustpan may have fowled the locking bar.
Our site was extremely wide, and our grey water hose would not reach the sullage point. A questioned was asked at the office and we were told to drop the grey water on the adjacent garden.
With rain approaching, “He” attempted to setup our annexe by taking a shortcut with the setup process. Naturally, the shortcut failed, and the setup was abandoned with rain falling and “He” was wet from not having worn a raincoat. Later in the day the annexe was setup was completed roughly, and it will do for this trip. One of the main issues with the annexe was the surface we are camped on. The site has a slight down slope where our annexe sits but more importantly, we are camped on a synthetic grass surface that is extremely had to put pegs into. This was the reason that the annexe was setup “roughly”.
Our group met for a quick happy hour where details of this muster were explained.
After the conclusion of happy hour, “He” finished our setup as the rain had stopped. Microwave meals for tea and then we watched the movie, Notting Hill before heading to bed well before the movie finished. We ran our air conditioning on “night mode” until 11:30pm when it was programmed to shutoff. Neither of us heard the air conditioning stop.