Before I left, I checked in on the traditional attraction of Coffs Harbour.

The Big Banana offers things like ice skating and laser tag, so there wasn’t really anything there I was interested in, but I felt obliged to take this photo:

With that done, I packed up and headed to Port Macquarie.  This is Turtle Shell’s home base for the next two weeks:

You can just see the edge of the caravan next to me – that one belongs to Dennis and Denise (no, I’m not joking).  They’re a husband and wife who are headed up north, and Dennis came over to have a chat with me while I was setting everything up.  He was very nice, helping me with the awning and everything, and he showed me how to wrap my chains up so they’re less likely to rust, and even sprayed them with a fancy silicon spray he had to keep them in good condition.

That wasn’t the end of his generosity, though.  After he’d done my chains for me, he said, “If you’re on your own, you’ll have a use for this,” and brought this out of his caravan for me:

You’re wondering what it does, right?  Well, I was too – he showed me, and I’m going to show you guys in photos I took on the caravan floor, in front of the fridge.

Now, this is a device that helps you back the car onto the caravan accurately.  It’s in two pieces, both of which have magnets in the base:

They can telescope out even further, but I figured this was sufficient for the demonstration – you have to be able to see them in your rear-view mirror.  The one with prongs at the base attaches just below the handle of the ball socket on the caravan, and the other one attaches magnetically to the ball on the car.  When they’re in position and you’re lined up, they look like this:

The little red circle has to be horizontal.  Then, as you reverse, when you’re in the right position, the end of the rod on the caravan will hit the horizontal sign on the one you put on the car, and you’ll see this:

At which point, you stop the car because you’re in the perfect position to hook up – isn’t that clever?  Dennis actually gave this outright to me, saying that he has cameras now and I could actually make use of it – isn’t that nice?

Very good start to Port Macquarie.  Well, that part was.  On a less cheerful note, the left indicator on the caravan has stopped working, so I’ll need to get someone to check that out.