At Easter we took our caravan to Shoal Bay Caravan park at Port Stephens which is located about ¾ of an hour drive north of Newcastle NSW.
Shoal Bay caravan park is located opposite Shoal Bay beach within walking distance of shops, restaurants, a Hotel and a couple of Clubs. There is also a shop that hires out pushbikes.
We went away with a group of friends who hired cabins for the weekend. The cabins were $250 per night, however our ensuite site only cost us $68 per night. Quite a difference you would agree. We spent a lot of time eating and sitting around the tables under our awning, we could seat eight people comfortably.
The caravan park was generally well presented, however we had to point out some maintenance issues that needed fixing in our ensuite. The ensuite sites had Foxtel (pay TV) available free of charge ($20 deposit for the lead). The caravan park does not have a shop; however they do sell ice at the office. The park does not have a swimming pool.
There are quite a few things to do and see around Shoal Bay and most are within walking distance from the caravan park. Shoal Bay is located on the Tomaree Peninsula which is at the entrance to Port Stephens from the ocean. The entrance has a mountain either side of it and there is a psychiatric facility at the peninsula. I was told that this facility was established to accommodate soldiers that had suffered mental trauma during the war.
In the early 1940s Port Stephens was a large natural harbour close to the vulnerable, yet essential steelworks of Newcastle. Australia was at war with Japan. An unguarded Port Stephens could have provided an easy landing place for any hostile force. The guns at Newcastle were too far away to provide protection for Port Stephens. By the end of 1942 Fort Tomaree was constructed on the Southern headland at Tomaree Peninsula, with two "six inch" (152mm) guns, torpedo tubes, mortars, machine guns, rifle pits, search lights, command posts, observation posts, barbed wire entanglements and accommodation. The guns were never fired in anger. Their installation did however provide peace of mind and the facilities for artillery training. The RAAF also established a radar station on the top of the headland.
There are walking trails to the locations where the guns were and a trail that takes you to the top where the radar was. It is well worth the walk to the top. From the top you have 360 deg views.Tea Gardens and Jimmy’s Beach can be seen to the North and Fingal head Lighthouse and sand spit to the South. You can also walk through psychiatric facility and almost to the entrance to Port Stephens where there are picnic and Barbecue facilities; you have to carry your picnic baskets etc as cars are not permitted.
Located a short walk in the other direction is another headland which is home to the old Nelson Head lighthouse. The Coastal Patrol Station is also located on this headland which commands views all over the Port Stephens area.
Being Easter we observed the no meat tradition of Good Friday. We enjoyed some nice prawns washed down with some cold beer for lunch. For dinner we pre-ordered fish and chips from what I consider to be one of the best fish and chip shops I have eaten from “Aussie Bobs fish and chips”.
Shoal Bay is a hive of activity at Easter; we intended to eat out on Saturday night at one of the restaurants but left our run to late and could not find one that could accommodate six of us. We had to settle for takeaway pizza which we had to wait an hour for.
We had to pay for a minimum of 5 nights accommodation so we stayed until late Monday afternoon before returning home as we both had to work on the Tuesday.
We had a very enjoyable break away and will return for another stay at Shoal Bay Caravan Park.

We have posted quite a few photographs in the gallery of our website www.caravanersfriend.com which we hope you will find of interest.

Toowoon Bay on the Central Coast of New South Wales is where we spent our Christmas break this year, which is only about an hours drive down the F3 freeway from our place.

We had booked an ensuite site for eight nights from the 2nd of January. It was raining when we left home around 10.30am on the Saturday morning, as we got closer to our destination the weather fined up long enough for us and a few others who had arrived at the caravan park the same time as us to get our vans and annexes set up before the rain came down again.

We nearly always find when caravanning that we meet friendly people as we have once again, not long after we had arrived Barrie and Eileen from Sydney arrived and set up on the site next to ours, it wasn’t long before a conversation was struck and the alcohol flowed well into the night as we got acquainted with our new friends and their dog Pip.

It had rained for most of the first tree days we were there with only a break every now and then; we took some time for a drive around the area and did a little bit of shopping, some reading and some drinking.

Finally on the Tuesday it was nice and sunny we woke early and were keen to be able to have a good walk before breakfast. When we went outside the van it was a nice fine day there was even a bit of dew on the cars making it a beautiful morning. We headed out of the caravan park and headed south past a golf course, this road led us to the access to Shelly Beach. We decided to walk back along the beach which was quiet enjoyable with a lot of people surfing, walking there dogs as there is an allocated area on the beach for taking your dogs and lots of people just enjoying the morning walk. I think most people were like us waiting for nice weather to be able to get out.

The Caravan Park (Toowoon Bay Holiday Park) we stayed at was pet friendly so people were able to bring their dogs, there were quite a number of pets in the park. We haven’t stayed in a park before that allows animals but it hasn’t been a problem at all, it was actually quite amusing at times with the odd dog fight with the owners frantically trying to separate them.

There was a Christian group who had set up camp on the grounds next to the Caravan Park and at 9.30am everyday they came around the park offering lots of activities for children, apparently they have been doing it for 50 years.

Wednesday was hot and a bit windy, we went for our morning walk and we found it a bit of an effort especially when walking back from the beach and walking up the steep stairs, we couldn’t wait to get back to our van and have breakfast and to be able to sit and relax. We spent most of the day reading and on the laptops. The caravan park had a Wi-Fi internet connection, however we were just on the fringe of the coverage area so we had to use our own wireless broadband. We have a small network setup in the caravan so we can use both our laptops on the internet simultaneously.

We do not watch a lot of television when we are away so we utilise one of the laptops and a usb HDTV receiver for our TV. It cost about $80 and it works well, or at least until we set it up at Toowoon Bay. We spent hours trying to get a good reception without to much success. When we got home I found a broken connection in the TV aerial connection on the outside of the caravan.

Thursday morning it was overcast and we were getting very light showers of rain. We had breakfast and as the rain had stopped so we decided to go for our morning walk, the sand dunes and steps were still hard to climb when leaving the beach. The weather was still ordinary so we decided to visit Norah Head to see the lighthouse .The views there were beautiful even though we didn’t go in the lighthouse we took photos (photos posted in the gallery on this website) and there were a lot of people on the rocks below either fishing or just having a wander around. We drove around to see what else Norah Head had to offer, there was a caravan park not far from the beach. It looked as though the beach there must become quiet busy as there were a lot of car parking areas.

We headed back to Toowoon Bay via Wyong, had some lunch at Tuggerah then looked at some nice new Coromal caravans at a dealership. It’s quiet surprising what is fitted in some of theses new caravans and we hope when we set off travelling for weeks at a time we will be able to update to one that has a bathroom, mainly for convenience more than anything. We then enjoyed sitting around in the afternoon and evening having a drink and a laugh with our friendly neighbours.

Friday was much the same as our previous days spent walking on the beach, eating, drinking and chatting the weather had finally come good. Our new friends next door had some old friends who live nearby over for dinner, we tried to stay out of their way but they found us and insisted we join them as they were going home the next day.

Saturday we awoke to a hive of activity with lots of people madly packing up their caravans, annexes and tents to head home. Out of the eight ensuite sites there were only two of us that did not leave on the Saturday, we were staying until the Sunday and the other people were staying another week. We said our good bye’s to our new friends next door and waved them off. We had some friends coming down to see us for the day on Saturday and to our surprise they had booked a cabin at the other end of the park for the night save driving home in the dark. We took the opportunity to take down our annex while it was dry and just left the rollout awning out on our caravan.

It got really hot on the Saturday so we spent the afternoon on our friends cabin’s balcony in the shade. When we returned to our caravan to have a barbecue with our friends we were quite shocked, every site was once again occupied, the area was a hive of activity and there were kids and dogs running everywhere. We could not believe how two Saturday afternoons could be so different, the Saturday we arrived it was raining and everyone was inside their vans and annexes. We don’t know if we would have survived another week. Caravan Park etiquette had gone out the window this day. The people behind us had helped themselves to about 1.5M of our site and the pegs holding the ropes on their bed flies were actually in the ground under the back of our caravan. We had kids riding bikes across our annex pad under our awning and a dog tried to savage me when I walked past one of the new arrivals vans. As it turned out there were about 4 families holidaying together occupying various ensuite sites.

The new campers in our area partied until about 11.30pm. We were up early Sunday morning had some breakfast rolled up the awning and dropped the poptop on the caravan. We had to back the Landcruiser up to the caravan at an angle so we could get the turn to get it out of the tight space it was now in. We were able to drive through across the site behind us when we had arrived eight days before, it may have been easier if old mate behind hadn’t pinch all of our remaining area behind our van as we could have reversed the van back a couple of metres and got enough swing to get it out. All was good although it makes it a little difficult installing load levellers etc when your vehicle is at 45deg to your caravan.

A short trip up the F3 freeway and we were home by 10.00am.

Please visit our gallery on our site www.caravanersfriend.com

Navman GPS issues

I am writing this blog out of frustration

My Christmas gift from my wife last year was a very nice top of the range Navman S300T.

One of the attractions to the Navman was a free 2009 map upgrade. My frustration is that I still have not received my free map upgrade. I have made several phone call to Navman during 2009 enquiring about the upgrade. The standard response was always that the 2009 map upgrade will be available later in the year.

The Navman website even says that the upgrades will be available in October 2009. I spoke with a representative from Navman yesterday and he assured me that I would have my map updates by the end of December (yeh pigs might fly too), and in what form he did not know.

My issue is not really that I have not received the free update as promised, it is more the fact that the maps currently on my less than 12 months old navman are way out of date.

We have lived in our current house for 3 years and the street has existed for 4 years, the map stops about 1 third of the way up the street so I have had to set my home location in the GPS to about 500M from my actual street address.

Last January we were travelling back from Central Queensland, the Navman decided to take us off the highway just south of Brisbane, do a lap around a block and put us back on the highway exactly where we left it.

When I was in Sydney last week the Navman tried to get me to make a right hand turn into a street that has been blocked off to entering traffic.

Other than the mapping issues I am extremely pleased with the S300T and it’s many features, I feel better now I have vented my frustrations.

We had our first trip away in our Caravan last weekend arriving on the Friday afternoon and leaving on Sunday morning.

We arrived at our destination which was Birrubi Beach Caravan Park at Anna Bay located in Port Stephens NSW Australia on Friday afternoon.

The weather was great, a little on the warm side which is what we were hoping for. We set the van up which didn’t take long as we only rolled out the awning and did not bother with the annexe. It was our first time away since buying the van so we were doing this short trip to see what we had and what we had forgotten. Our next trip will be for a longer period of time so we thought a trial run would be good and also a good break.

After setting up the van and having afternoon tea we decided we would enjoy a walk on the beach. It was a beautiful afternoon but as we approached the beach we could see dark clouds appearing from the south which looked like a storm may be approaching,but we continued our walk as it seemed like it still could be a while off.

When we arrived back at our van we watched as some newcomers arrived and set there van up. It wasn’t too long after that the storm hit and it bucketed down. We thought this will certainly test us to see if we had leaks or anything else going on with the van, one thing we did discover was ants, thousands of them all over the cupboards. We think the nest was behind the fridge and the heat drove them out.

We booked an ensuite site but didn’t think to ask if the site had a concrete slab for our awning or annexe. We were a bit surprised when we found we had a grass site which was now dirt as the school holidays had only finished the previous week. This didn’t really matter only we hadn’t bought anything with us to put on the ground. We decided to go to the local shopping centre to see what we could get to put on the ground so we would not walk dirt in the van and to get something to get rid of the ants.We found some rubber square mats that have holes in them and lock into one another, there are six in the pack and once put together they make a nice mat in front of the door and there was enough room to put our table and chairs on for when we were sitting under the annexe, we also bought some Ant rid which is great as the ants are attracted to the sweet syrup and when they eat it they take it back to the nest to feed to the Queen ant and others then they die, it worked very well.

The storm hit and it certainly rained quiet heavy with a lot of thunder and lightning which caused a blackout, we had no power so we decided to go for a drive to see what area had power as we were planning on dining out. We found a nice Tavern at Salamander Bay with reasonably priced meals, the meal and service was very good and it turned out to be a good choice. By the time we returned to the caravan park the power had been restored.

During the night we had quiet a bit of rain, when we woke the next morning we had a pool of water in front of the cupboard under the sink and there was also water in the cupboard so we weren’t sure at first whether it was from the rain or a leaking kitchen tap. After some mopping up and investigating it appeared it was a leak from our newly fitted tap, which we have repaired since we got home. We just turned the water off when we were not using it.

We had a shower of rain on Saturday morning around 6am but it turned out to be a nice day.

Our first adventure on Saturday was to take the Landcruiser (4WD) for a drive along Stockton Beach and what an adventure that turned out to be. The first part of the journey was quiet enjoyable but when approaching our destination which the Sygna a shipwreck that was washed ashore in May 1974 we were driving a little to close to the water and got bogged in a soft section of sand. We flagged down a nice young guy who was driving past and we were lucky as he had all the equipment to get someone out of a situation like ours. He tried to tow us out with out success and we even tried some new equipment he had bought which came in handy when he used his winch and these rubber ramps under the back tyres we were pulled out of the sand in no time. One thing we did learn is that it is best to drive a bit further away from the water to avoid the soft sand which can appear from know where when driving along the beach. It is a matter of experience which I am sure in time we will gain. Even after this happening I thought what a great adventure there were so many people on the beach in there 4 wheel drives either just driving on the beach or they had stopped to go fishing. We also saw some tin fishing shacks that are built in a secluded area on the beach behind the sand dunes which I believe some people live in.

That afternoon as I was doing a bit of work for this site my better half was off talking to our neighbours and it got the better of me and I decided I would go for a chat as well. What a nice couple we met they had travelled from Lismore to catch up with their son ,daughter in law and grandson, they travel when they get the chance and when their work allows them to which was interesting as I feel at times I could just pack up and go off traveling. They have traveled to a lot of places which we are interested in.

Well as this was our first trip away on our own for some time it has been a bit of an adjustment but we have survived and are looking to our next time when we can getaway, so keep watching this site for more updates on our adventures.

You can visit our gallery to see the photos we took.