I had a nice sleep-in after my long walks around the National Park, then it was time to pack everything up!  Well, not right away – I left around lunchtime, after I’d eaten a sandwich.  Then it was off to Lismore.

It took much longer than I’d expected, because the highway went up through the mountains on a very twisting route.  It was a highway, so technically the speed limit was 100km/h, but there were signs advising you to slow down to 35km/h for some turns.  So you can imagine how slowly I was taking things with the caravan.  At one point, I had a string of nine cars behind me waiting for a chance to pass!

I did go through Tabulam, and drive over the longest single-span wooden bridge in the southern hemisphere, so that’s something.  They were doing work on it, so I didn’t dare get out and take a picture, but have one snapped from on top of it while I was waiting for the workman to flip his stop sign around.

I finally arrived in the caravan park and set myself up.  There’s more people here than I expected, and the park is dog-friendly so there’s a few of them running around too.  In short, it’s much livelier than the Blue Topaz caravan park.

There wasn’t any set site for me – the lady at the reception desk just told me to pull up the caravan, hop out and look around, and choose any free site I wanted.  I liked being able to choose, and I picked a site that I could just drive into, no reversing needed.  I have a concrete slab next to Turtle Shell for my awning, and I’m close to the toilets but not right next to them.

Some people have wondered what goes into setting up Turtle Shell, so for them, prepare to be educated.  For others, prepare to be bored.

First, I make sure the caravan is positioned properly in the space, which can take longer than you might think.  I drove into this site without any need for reversing, and I still spent a good five minutes making sure Turtle Shell was straight.

As soon as that’s done, I apply the caravan’s handbrake.  Handbrake before anything else!  It’s the first thing I put on (but not actually the last thing to be removed when it’s time to pack up).  Then I put chocks under the wheels just to make sure, before I go about detaching Turtle Shell from the car.

I pull out the cords for the electric brakes and the caravan battery, and wrap them up in a plastic bag so the connectors don’t get wet.  Then I attach the jockey wheel, take off the anti-sway bars – bars anchored to the side of the tow ball that help to distribute the caravan’s weight, and also reduce sway – and unhook the chains.  I detach the actual tow ball last, and usually drive the car out of the way at this point.  (Come to think of it, maybe the car needs a name too!  Turtle Shell is taken, but what’s something that moves turtles?  Fin?  Current?  I’ll get back to you – or feel free to make a suggestion!)

Now it’s time to get the caravan level via the jockey wheel!  Some sites have a slight slope to them, but this one was pretty much level and didn’t need much help.  Still, we’ll see how it is in the morning, and if the soil settling has necessitated some changes.  You can tell whether a caravan is level pretty well just by eye alone, but I actually have a small leveller that I use to fine-tune it.

Once Turtle Shell is level, I lower the stabilisers – basically metal legs on each corner of the caravan that prevent it from rocking as you move around in it.  They can sink into the ground pretty easily though (not so you’ll notice a lean, but just enough to make winding them up again difficult) so I have little pieces of wood underneath mine to stop that.

And then I’m done!  With the mechanics of it, anyway – I still had to set up the power, drinking water, and grey water lines!  This is the first park I’ve been to that had grey water facilities, and they were just a little, ceramic-lined hole in the ground that you put the end of your pipe in.  Obviously that’s an opening for a pipe of some sort underground.

Once Turtle Shell was set up outside, it was time to go inside and take everything out of ‘travel mode’.  There’s not a whole lot of change, but there are little adjustments – my electric toothbrush comes out of my crockery cabinet and goes on the kitchen bench, my alarm clock comes out of my underwear drawer and goes on my bedside table, that sort of thing.  I take the cover off the sink, take my water jugs down from the food cabinet and fill them up, right anything that’s tipped over…

I also check my wardrobe.  Clothes hangers have a tendency to fall down during travel, so I was surprised to find that all the clothes were in their proper place.  Definitely a shock.  Considering all the twisting and turning I’d done on the drive here, I expected to find them all on the floor.  But I didn’t have to either brake or accelerate very suddenly on the drive, so maybe that’s the secret?

Turtle Shell, ready to be lived in:

By now it was getting dark, so I went for a shower.  No charge for hot water here – score!  I used the soap I bought from the Washpool farm, and now I smell wonderful!  The shower areas are much larger than the Blue Topaz, and I was wondering if they’d get cold once you turned off the hot water, but I needn’t have worried – it’s much warmer here than in Stanthorpe.  It’s 9:30 at night and I haven’t even turned on the heater!  In Stanthorpe, it was turned on almost as soon as the sun went down.

Tomorrow, I’ll go to the Lismore information centre and work out a rough schedule for my time here.  This caravan park doesn’t have WiFi, so it might be a little while before you get an update (I mean, I have a Telstra dongle but the data is very expensive), but it will come eventually!