The simplicity of travel by caravan

As a child, my parents dragged me around Australia in a caravan for five years. My dad had been diagnosed as having kidney disease and in those days the option was dialysis machine or die. He didn't want to be hooked up to a machine, he told us. If he was going to go, he said, he wanted to see his country before he died. So we sold up everything we had in Sydney, and we took to the road. We had a caravan so massive that it deserved the title 'mobile home', as they call them in the USA. It had separate bedrooms for my parents at one end and my sister and I at the other, with a dining-living area and bathroom in between. Wherever we went people stared and when we pulled up at a caravan park or camping ground, they'd come over for a chat, the blokes asking my dad technical questions ("how much juice does she chew?") and the women asking mum, enviously, if they could stick there head in for a snoop. It wasn't the kind of thing people towed around the country in those days (the late 1970s to early 1980s), but that's exactly what we did, travelling the length and breadth of Australia in those five years. We lived off my parents savings and investments, and Mum and Dad picked up work when opportunities arose... grape picking, shark fishing, and so on. My sister was a toddler but I did correspondence school, eagerly collecting my assignments and library books from prearranged post offices, having 'holidays' when we were on the road, and working hard to make up for the breaks when we settled down somewhere for a while. But the travel itself was the best education of all. We met so many different types of people every day and were confronted with such wildly different kinds of lifestyles. I had to quickly learn how to adapt to fit in. We stopped at places we liked for as long as we liked, and we moved on when we had experienced enough. Or simply missed being on the road. Because we all loved the road, Mum, Dad, my sister, and I. We loved the whole ritual of packing up and hooking the van on to the car and just taking off... we even had a theme song, Willy Nelson's 'On The Road Again', and Dad would pop in the tape as soon as we hit the bitumen. There's something so appealing about traveling in a caravan as I was reminded when we came across this quaint old van parked on an empty paddock in the Arkamas Peninsula, Cyprus. After so many five star hotels with their tedious check in procedures, the well-appointed rooms to inspect, and the expansive buffet breakfasts to try, for the first time in many years, I found myself craving a far simpler traveling experience, that by caravan...