Wednesday...12 June 2013

Golly it is warm here. Yes I know I used to live in this sort of environment but somehow I have grown soft in my retirement and am really feeling the heat. Early morning is nice, cooler than the middle of the day anyway, and once the sun goes down it is more bearable. It is just that four or five hours in the middle of the day that stings a bit! We have been just sitting, reading, doing crosswords, playing games on the computer and admiring the view outside our air-conditioned  caravan!
The cost of a caravan park is much higher in the west than over east but we are seeing a rapid rise in park fees around Australia. The parks quote higher operating costs and we have no doubt there is some truth in this as the price of utilities such as power and water rise, but we feel they are pricing themselves out of the market. They grumble and groan because people are using free bush camps more than caravan parks, but the people are doing this because they cannot afford the fees charged by the caravan parks everyday. Catch 22. The parks say they have to charge more because they are not getting the customers, the customers say they cannot afford the parks because of the price increases.
There are one or two parks that have lost us and we will be passing the word to others as we travel and this is because we were charged extra for being a big van. There is still only two people in this van, we do not use any more power or water than anyone else. We do not have any facilities or fixtures that are not in other caravans in fact I can think of a couple of things we do not have that they do and some caravans are actually longer than us if you add the length of their draw bar into the equation and yet we are now being charged more because we supposedly cost a caravan park more to have us stay.
From here on we will be saying no thanks to any park with that policy and if necessary we too will free camp in those areas.
Might be time to start looking for that "paddock"!