After I Was a Rooster, Now I’m a Feather Duster

When I established out on my initial adventure pulling a 2.5 tonne caravan guiding my shiny new, Toyota Prado 4 Wheel Generate, I realized Jack about caravans. I’d just picked it up – all 7 metres of it – at a Geelong sales lawn.

It was raining seriously. Dressed in my standard shorts, polo shirt, good high quality thongs, wearing my Canadian Tilley hat, my Tag-Heuer diving look at, and common positive outlook, I held an umbrella about the head of an employee who patiently showed me how to hitch the caravan to the Prado. He was currently saturated, but I felt as although I should really at least be creating an effort to retain him dry.

On the drive to a caravan park only five or 6 kilometres absent, I struggled via hefty Friday afternoon visitors, travelled more than a bridge undergoing a revamp that looked way too slim for my caravan but finally obtained to the caravan park in one piece. I had considered I ought to have shown a big signal that said, “Caution. Newbie towing Caravan”.

Destiny and good driving kept me in good stead. All I had to do now was to survive 8 weeks driving close to the beautiful state of Victoria. With my caravan selection plate exhibiting the byline, “Victoria, the place to be”, it appeared like I had produced the proper alternative. Not as much to travel from my property at Alice Springs if the new caravan experienced a warranty difficulty.

By the end of the 8 weeks, I experienced made the decision there are two principal varieties of folks just one fulfills in caravan parks, the particular person:

1. who won’t be able to aid himself (normally adult males) from telling you how considerably far better all the equipment they have on their caravan is than yours
2. who has retired from the workforce but who cannot forged off the idea of how quite critical he had been just before retirement. He was after a Rooster, but now is just a feather duster

A person of the to start with areas I stopped, I overlook in which it was now, we had no sooner parked our van and this fellow turned up carrying what we known as a “giggle hat” in the military, more typically identified as a bucket hat. Well, he experienced to convey to me that he experienced the xyz style widget for his van and experienced observed that I had the inferior zyx widget on mine. It was just what I required to hear a few days immediately after shelling out $50 odd thousand for a caravan.

Next, it was the abc widget – I must have gotten one of those. So it went on until I sooner or later explained to him that I had to established up my caravan – which should really have been apparent to any 10 calendar year aged – and he left us alone. Had he not, I almost certainly would have tackled him in an uncharacteristically impolite fashion.

A handful of times afterwards I achieved the gentleman who had been so vital, if I had lived in Perth, I likely would have listened to of him. He had to tell me how he experienced been the Chief Government Officer of one of Australia’s major IT businesses. He also had a one engine plane he experienced purchased in a kit from the United states and assembled all by himself. He also had to convey to me about his expensive Breitling pilot’s observe.

He seemed like a great particular person so I failed to have the heart to tell him I did not give a brass razoo what he experienced been. I didn’t convey to him about my collection of tertiary qualifications and that I had been a significant shot in an educational establishment, a senior community servant in not one particular, but two governments. To me, all that is now meaningless, just a usually means of surviving for 50 odd years.

I am just a retiree who enjoys not being anything at all but a greying nomad who gets up each working day and decides what he needs to do to fill in what hrs he has left. It’s a good phase of lifetime and allows just one to vacation thoroughly. Full freedom. Living the desire!

Now when I fulfill these types, I just let them rabbit on until finally they operate out of a thing to say. If they talk to me what I did in advance of I retired, I explain to them the fact: I worked at a significant stability facility 25 km west of Alice Springs and my job was so top secret even I didn’t know what I was undertaking. That ordinarily shuts them up.

I am delighted to be a feather duster.