As we progressed on our big trip last
year we began to realise how poorly designed many caravan parks are. With the
enormous increase in caravan travel in recent years we assumed that park owners
would have tried to tap into what we thought would be a lucrative market by
providing, at least, good basic services.
The more we
travelled the more I began to look for the things that we considered were musts
for a good van site.
My wife and
I are retired in our sixties so our needs are simple and few. At the very least,
we like a park to have:
1. Easy access to the park itself - easy
entry with room to park while registering;
2. Easy access to sites - roads or reasonable width & sites that are easy to
reverse into;
3. Services (power, water and sullage) to sites conveniently located;
4. Clean and well-designed amenities;
5. Friendly atmosphere.
We consider 1-4 to be the most important
features for an enjoyable stay in a park where we plan to stay a while. Number 5
is really a bonus - if your immediate neighbours are friendly, it does not
matter what the park staff are like. We have not struck many parks where the
staff gets the thumbs down but you can live with that if everything else is OK.
Amazingly, given that caravanning is so
big today, we found very few parks where we could give a high rating to every
feature. Most parks fell down somewhere and the worst were those where accessing
the site was made difficult by narrow roads, awkwardly angled sites, trees or
posts badly positioned, high kerbing, or raised annex pads, to list a few. The
worst offender in this feature we found was the Emerald Cabin and Caravan
Village, the only one we came across that was supposedly drive through but where
there were so many trees that you had to reverse out with only inches to spare
on either side of the van. You could not drive out without taking a couple of
trees with you and if you deviated slightly when reversing out - same problem.
There are endless examples of poor
planning and development. One of the features that often bemused me was the
poorly placed services to van sites and probably the worst example of this was
Belair Gardens, Geraldton, where our power, water and sullage lines had to run
under the van and across the annex pad. Every vanner is familiar with the shower
cubicles with funny shower roses, insufficient clothes hooks or shelves, no
protection from the shower for your gear and cubicles that allow your dropped
soap to end up next door. On the other hand, the attention to cleanliness in
most parks was excellent.
I have just realised that this probably
sounds like a big whinge but the poor design evident in so many parks really
surprised me. I must also add that the number of parks, in spite of their
shortcomings, that we would mark never to return was very, very small and we have stayed in more
than a hundred over the past four years. We also found that the friendliness of
most ‘vanners soon helped us disregard any park shortcomings. This camaraderie
was particularly noticeable in the odd crookie that we encountered where you
tend to develop a "friends sharing adversity" attitude.