hiking

How big does a caravan need to be for a couple travelling with a dog?

| Chris Riley

You may be wondering just how big a Caravan set up is that would be suitable for a couple with a dog. If you’re considering setting up for caravan travel I guess the answer to that will depend on what the basics are that are necessary for you. Every rig is a compromise of some sort, and every couple has their own set of needs and wants to make living in a caravan enjoyable for them. A bigger rig gives more on board storage space, but it also needs more space to store your van when not in use. You’ll need a substantial vehicle to tow it with, and your fuel economy will be higher than if you can manage with a smaller rig.

A smaller rig is lighter to tow so you won’t need a heavy duty tow vehicle. There won’t be as many cupboards and drawers inside it either so you will have to be economical with what you pack to take away with you. When it’s not in use a smaller van is less cumbersome to store. If you don’t mind the canvas skirt around the top of a pop top caravan, one of these may even fit into your garage, or under your carport.

Think about whether you want an ensuite in your van. We’ve had two caravans with ensuites, and two caravans without. I used to think it was important. But now I’m happier without that extra size and weight behind us when travelling along. We do carry a porta-loo on board, and we manage between caravan parks by having a PTA shower (Privates, tips and armpits). Some people carry a portable shower with them that they set up in a separate shower tent.

Shall I tell you about our rig? Okay, get yourself a cup of coffee and settle yourself into a comfy chair, and I’ll tell you what we manage with now…..

We have a very modest, 15 year old, Coromal Magnum 457, pop top. It’s only 15 feet in length, has two single beds, and it doesn’t have an ensuite. The caravan has been well kept, and didn’t look to have had taking any sort of beating. We only paid $18,000 for it. At the time of purchase we thought our Subaru Forrester would be okay as a tow vehicle, it was legally able to manage the weight of the Magnum. However the 200km trip to bring it home told us how wrong in that assumption we were. The mileage was horrendous. The next week out went the Subaru and in come the vehicle we now tow with, a 2020 Pajero Sports.

Our caravan has air conditioning, but at the moment that’s not working. (The joys of buying an older van, things in it may getting towards the end of their use by date). However, our idea of caravanning isn’t so much to go to different places, but rather to be in perfect weather. (Hence Broome is repeatedly on our winter travel agenda). We’ve been a bit further this year. We went up to Darwin which is hotter, and more humid than Broome. Air conditioning would have been useful up there. However we have two fans, one for at the end of each bed, and the fans together with the great ventilation that a pop top has, meant the van cooled down quickly. When the outside temperature dropped the van cooled down quickly. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t unmanageable. Personally I think we’re all getting a little too reliant on things such as air conditioning and heating anyway. I wonder sometimes if we’re losing the ability for our bodies to self-regulate temperature. Never-the-less we will get the air con looked it to see if it can be fixed. If it’s past it’s use by date we’ll think hard before replacing it. I doubt it’s going to get much use, but as it’s housed inside a cabinet, the space it takes up could be better utilised for storage. There are some pretty damn good portable air conditioning units now too. They don’t take up much space, and could travel in the car to be brought out only when needed. Something for us to think about. If any of you reading this already have a caravan and if it has air conditioning, do you use it very much? I’d be interested to know, it may help us make our decision.

The fridge is a 90 litre built in 3 way fridge. It runs very well on gas, but can be temperamental on 240 or 12 volt. A lot of people seem to be replacing their 3 way caravan fridges now with two way compressor fridges. We’re considering doing the same. So, again if any of you reading this have a caravan we’d be interested to hear what type of fridge you have. If you have a compressor fridge do you regret not being able to run it on gas? We have a good battery pack and solar panels. We’ll need to look into it further yet, but we think the battery pack will be sufficient to run both our caravan with a compressor fridge, and our portable Bushman fridge. We’ve been looking at the Bushman 130 litre compressor fridge. Apparently this fridge should fit into the same space as our Dometic 90 litre fridge. That’s a lot more internal fridge space for the same amount of caravan space that the current fridge takes up. Do any of you have a Bushman Fridge? Are you happy with it?

We’re both in our 70s now and as we’ve grown older we find a good nights sleep has become harder to achieve. In a caravan the single beds help, plus they’re easier to make, the bedding is easier to launder, and single beds give a feeling of more space inside the van.

We have a wardrobe between our twin beds that has a cupboard underneath. That’s where we store our porta loo during the day. At night we pull it out and place up the other end of the van, and then we put the dogs bed on the floor between us in front of the wardrobe. At home he sleeps on our bed, but single beds just aren’t big enough. It took a few nights of perseverance to get him to accept the new sleeping arrangements, but he has no problems with it now. The wardrobe has shelves in it rather than hanging space. We use packing cubes, and between the shelves, the overhead cabinets, and the under bed storage we have tons of space for all of our clothes and other stuff.

We’ve also purchased a number of attractive cane baskets which sit on the shelf that goes all around the van above the cabinets. The baskets house our tea towels, bath and beach towels, games, dog grooming gear, and several other bits and pieces. When we’re travelling most of the baskets sit on the beds, with some in a crate on the floor between the beds. When we pull up for a night it takes less than 10 minutes to pop the roof up, unzip the top windows, and put the baskets on the top shelf.

Apart from the lower initial cost of our second hand pop top, and the fact that it fits into our available storage space at home, the thing we really love is how airy it is. It’s a caravan, but the canvas around the top (or the PVC or whatever it’s made of) gives it a bit of a feel of camping. We love that. In our fifth wheeler and full height New Age caravan it took much longer for the van to cool down and for the breeze to blow through taking all the stale air from travelling with it.

That’s basically it for our indoor set up. It’s a small set up, but it’s adequate. There’s plenty of room for two old codgers, all of their gear and their little Labradoodle. We’re comfortable. We do as much of our living outdoors as we can, so our outdoor set up is extensive. For now though this post is already almost long enough to be a book. I’d better tell you about our outdoor set up another day.

Oh – and for any of you interested in how my editing problems are coming along with WordPress. Their AI assistant escalated the issue to their ‘happiness engineers’. Eventually they acknowledged this is a known problem, and they sent me a link to a Jetpack editor. It seems to be working a treat. I do hope they fix the problem though soon. It’s been a problem for years….. Honestly – just how long does it take! I guess companies just never fix errors these days, they’re far too busy trying to move on to bigger and better things.

Birthday celebrations at Wooramel River Retreat

| Chris Riley

176 kms on from Nerren Nerren is the Wooramel River Retreat. We’ve passed it many times before, this was the first time we’ve stopped in to take a look. It won’t be the last. There’s no potable water, and no power, but they have flush toilets, artesian water warm showers, and artesian water fed hot pools to soak in. They have a cafe, a bar, and a restaurant. I think there’s a few accommodation options, as well as grassed caravan/camping sites close to the restaurant area, or the more popular, large and roomy riverside sites a bit further away, each with it’s own fire pit. We chose one of the Riverside sites.

Give me a home amongst the Gum Trees any day. In this case, beautiful, white trunked River Gums, on the banks of the dry Wooramel river bed. This river is similar to several in the Gascoyne area, they flow upside down apparantly, only rarely having water flow on the top surface. This one hasn’t had any water above ground since August 2024, and if there was water in it at the moment, the whole area would no doubt have been flooded and we wouldn’t have been able to get into the retreat. We set up camp, had some lunch and visited the artesian pools for a bit of soak.

The pools don’t look wonderful, but they are gorgeous and warm , and in an outback place like Wooramel, they are a certainly worth taking advantage of.

It was my 71st birthday so treated ourselves to a bottle of bubbles on the restaurant lawn, a delicious lamb burger with roasted Mediterranean vegetables and a yogurt sauce. The marshmallows toasted over their communal fire.

Cheers

The next morning we rose early (as we always do), and sat outside under the gumtrees as we watched the day break. The sunrise was stunning.

There’s a 5 km riverside walk. No water in the River, but the walk was peaceful, with some amazing River Gums, so gnarled they look more like a sculpture than a tree.

So that was our two nights at Wooramel. What a pleasure! We loved it.

Distance between Nerren Nerren and Wooramel River Retreat 176kms

Re-fuel costs: 35 litres @$2.18 Total $76

Accommodation for 2 nights, $84

PS Please excuse any spelling or/and grammatical errors in this. WordPress is such a pain to use these days. It can take me 30 minutes to try and correct the errors made in 10 minutes of typing. I get so frustrated with the site sometimes……. After 30 minutes of frustration I give up and just publish it anyway. (Honest, I’m not completely illiterate, just technically challenged, especially so with WordPress these days.) I wonder if there’s anywhere I can actually leave a review of WordPress…..

Full Circle

| Chris Riley

I think I started this blog around 13 years ago. Its purpose was to record our travels. The title of the website: lifeofrileyow.com standing for Life of Riley on wheels. When circumstances weren’t what we expected (by way of pesky puppy who didn’t comply with our idea that any dog of ours would love a life on the road’,)the road trips stopped. I then changed the OW to stand for ‘on whatever’, so as I could keep on recording our journey through life without the title of my website becoming meaningless.

WOW what a ride the past 13 years have been, more twists and turns than the average road trip, more forks in the road of life than the average person sees for sure, and more about turns and changes in direction than is good for anyone’s health, I think you’d agree.

But here we are 13 years or so on. We’ve moved from Busselton into a lovely little (but not too little) lock and leave duplex in Mandurah. Mandurah used to be primarily a holiday or retirement destination. It still is to some degree, but it’s also now well and truly linked to the metro area in Perth, so it’s become quite suburban. It was never a place we holidayed in often, I don’t know why. Anyway a few changes of circumstances caused us to move from Busselton, and somehow or other we landed in the Mandurah area. We ask ourselves daily, “How come we never holidayed here?”. If we had, perhaps we would have bought here instead of Busselton in the first place. However, ‘no regrets’, we met a lot of lovely people in Busselton, some of whom we will remain friends with for the rest of our lives I hope.

When life on the road stopped, we resigned ourselves to short overseas holidays leaving the ‘pesky puppy’ in the care of family or friends. The holidays were ok, but they weren’t the road trips we loved. Eventually we decided to give road trips another go, only we’d created a bit of problem. We’d downsized – we were living in a unit with very limited parking, and our diesel powered Prado had been changed for a Hybrid Yaris….. But ‘no problems, only solutions’ as the saying goes.

First a swag (loved it, but needed more space to carry it and the necessary camping gear to enable using it). The swag became a tiny camper trailer, then the tiny camper trailer became an A-liner camper trailer. The Yaris went, and was replaced with a Subaru Forester. The Forester and the A-liner were a really tight fit in our little unit. There definitely wasn’t room for any van even slightly bigger, nor a bigger car more suited to towing. So we started looking for somewhere more suitable to be living.

Long story short – we landed in Mandurah. We had intended to keep the A-liner, and the Forester for a year or two, but never-the-less we still browsed. And of course, if you browse long enough, you will get tempted….. The latest rig is a 2020 diesel powered Pajero Sports, and a 2012 Coromal Magnum pop top. I think this house, this car, and this van are all going to be our last, and yes I’ve said that before. But this time you can quote me on that. It’s time for us to settle down and stop moving around, even though that’s not strictly true. Moving around for part of the year is exactly what we intend to do, only from our lock’n’leave home, and in our Pajero Sports, and with our Coromal Magnum pop top hitched up behind us.

And that Pesky puppy who stopped us travelling on our road trips a few years ago – well he’s nine this year. When we purchased the small camper trailer, with a huge amount of trepidation, we went to the vet and got the equivalent of Prozac for him. The first trip in the camper trailer was so peaceful. He was one chilled out little dog, just laying and watching the world go by. The next trip we forgot to give him a pill, and guess what, he still lay down and watched the world go by. He’s grown out of his Pesky puppiness. One or two prozacs was all it took.

We’re currently at a campsite called Cosy Corner, right beside a beautiful beach near Albany WA for a week. Paul, not so pesky puppy, and me are all having a wonderful time, swimming, walking & relaxing.

The van is certainly no luxurious fifth wheeler like we had thirteen years ago, nor is it the New Age with toilet and shower on board. It’s just a humble little unpretentious pop top with single beds, and an on board porta loo tucked into a cupboard. It’s clean, comfortable, and much nicer to have trailing along behind you than a great big box that’s bigger than the tow vehicle. I was never overly comfortable with that.

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We’re only away for a week this time. But come May we’ll be heading off for 3 1/2 months, following the sun up to see our son and daughter-in-law in Darwin. I think I can sincerely end this little post with one of my favourite sayings for when life is just dandy (and we all know life isn’t always just dandy), but at the moment, I can definitely say, ‘what a pleasure’!

Dog Friendly, Flinder’s Bay Caravan Park at Augusta

| Chris Riley

For our first trip away in our little Avan, Georgie Girl, we decided we’d go again to Flinder’s Bay Caravan Park at Augusta. We stayed here only a few weeks ago in our previous Erde Camper trailer, and it was after that trip that we realised that ‘caravanning/camping’ really does put us in our ‘happy place’. That trip inspired us to go back to something that wasn’t canvas, it inspired us to get our little Georgie Girl. (Not that we don’t like canvas, in fact we do, it’s just that canvas is a little harder for two old codgers nearing their 70th birthdays). As you can see from the images below the caravan park is full of beautiful shady trees, with many of the sites having trees around three sides providing both shade and a feeling of privacy.

There’s three caravan parks in town, but during the main season Flinder’s Bay caravan park is the only one that takes dogs. I think during the off season it closes, and then dogs are allowed at Turner’s Caravan Park. I think both parks are council owned.

The park is right on the southern ocean, so the crashing waves provide wonderful background music. Several tracks lead out of the park directly to the ocean for a lovely walk down the rocky foreshore, or for a cooling dip for those brave enough to venture into the cold waters of the Southern Ocean. (Not me – if it’s not 40 in the shade, not much more than my big toes gets near the water). Dogs aren’t allowed on all of the coastline down here, but there is a dog friendly area of the beach at the eastern end of the caravan park. However, currently there are dozens (possibly even hundreds) of toxic Sea Hares washed up on shores of the ocean, and the banks of the river. These creatures are absolutely deadly to dogs, so it’s not wise to let a dog off the lead at the moment anywhere near water in Augusta. If you’ve never seen a Sea Hare, below is an image of 4 together on the banks of the river. Each would be around 20cms in length, and around 10cms across. They look like a huge piece of liver.

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A little mobile Ice Cream van that makes delicious real fruit Ice creams is often at Flinder’s Bay. Our first encounter with said Ice Cream van was accidental on our first night here when we walked down the path that led to the beach. Of course, we tried one. Yum! Today’s encounter was much more deliberate.

There are two ablution blocks in the park. Both are more than adequate, and are kept perfectly clean. With Seniors discount the cost for three nights is $145. It’s a lovely park, not pristine, and there’s no jumping pillows, no swimming pools, and no kids adventure playgrounds. It’s a park that feels close, (and is close) to nature. As I type this, our Mr Tilly is lying out under the trees, and there’s lots of little birds flitting all around, the waves are crashing in the background, and I can smell the eucalypt. Tills is happy, we’re happy, and in fact there are a lot of dogs here, and they all seem happy, as do their owners.

The park is about a twenty minute walk to the river. We have walked it, but we prefer to drive into the river picnic area and then walk down the river to the river mouth and back again to our car. It gives us about an hours walk and there’s so much to see on the river. Today we saw pelicans, dolphins, wind surfers, kite surfers, kayakers, swimmers, paddle boarders, and water craft of all types. As we meandered down the shady trees that line the river back we saw huge trees, Hampton’s style grand houses, little old river cottages, and of course, those ugly, deadly Sea Hares.

Augusta is a lovely little coastal town located at the south west corner of Western Australia. It’s where two rivers meet and run out into the ocean, and it’s also where two oceans meet, the Indian, and the Southern Oceans. You can read more about the town here https://lifeofrileyow.com/2019/05/14/augusta-the-small-town-where-two-big-oceans-meet/ It’s only just over an hour’s drive from Busselton where we live, but it’s a very different sort of coastal town. Busselton is a place with calm pristine waters and beaches. Augusta is place with a rugged coastline, and crashing waves. As far as coastal towns go, Busselton and Augusta are both gorgeous places, but they are as different from each other as night is from day.

We go home tomorrow after our three night ‘shake down’ trip. It’s been wonderful. A real pleasure, and we will be back this way again for sure. It’s a lovely caravan park, in an even more wonderful unpretentious little coastal town.