Why caravans and campervans are back in fashion
With shifting border scenarios — and Australian holiday-makersmakers mostly on the roads, not in the skies — the humble road trip is now the getaway of choice.
I am wary of caravans. It all harks back to childhood and English weather and parking too close to a cliff … in Cornwall, in what would today be called “wind events” but, back then, were howling storms that caused my “man with a van” father to swear like a sailor and break open a beer. But clearly I am in the minority. In hot news to hand, a company called, wait for it, Camplify, claims close to 65,000 Aussies will “celebrate the festive break in a local’s caravan or campervan”. This is a tremendous increase over last year’s figures for this “caravan and motorhome sharing community”, which is a sort of Airbnb on wheels.
It’s a good idea, of course, to be able to rent a motorhome in a sharing economy rather than forking out an untidy sum to buy one. Like trampolines and spa tubs, such vehicles surely have their moment in the sun and then the kids grow, parents scale down, the For Sale classifieds await.
This year, NRMA Parks & Resorts reports a 38 per cent increase in online bookings for the summer holiday period. With shifting border scenarios, and Australian holiday-makersmakers mostly on the roads, not in the skies, that sounds like one long traffic jam to me, at least along our east coast strip. But it’s possible to caravan (if I may use the word as a verb, which seems very 2020) at home. You could rent one and plonk it in the yard as overflow guest accommodation or roam about and go for a mini-encounter with an old-fashioned model that’s been repurposed as a gelato van or a food truck. Or rent, say, a gorgeous retro Airstream, dust off the Capri hostess pants and have it set up as a mini-hotel in the garden.
Repurposed vans dot the estates of regional hotels as well, often as pool bars or cocktail joints. At my “local” (pictured), Alessio from Lake Maggiore mixes delicious Aperol sours and other sunny-coloured concoctions. It’s a far cry from the cooled cups of tea and hard cheese sandwiches on the windblown Roseland Peninsula of my youth. But, like the best cocktails, we were shaken, rattled and rolled like nothing on earth in that old caravan. My father bravely maintained that while we pinched pennies on our holidays, the foam on his beer was always first class.
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