The Caravan We Bought at Sixty-Six and the Dashboard That Finally Made Sense

We bought the caravan the year I retired, which everyone warned us was a cliche, and we did it anyway because the alternative was sitting in a quiet house in Kempton Park waiting for the grandchildren to visit. My wife, Elize, had wanted one for thirty years. I had always found a reason not to. When the reasons ran out, which is what retirement really is, we drove to a dealership outside Pretoria and bought a second-hand caravan that smelled faintly of someone else's holidays, and we named her nothing because Elize said naming a caravan is bad luck, she had read it somewhere.

The plan was simple and enormous. We would drive the country. Not in a rush, not to anywhere in particular, just down the long roads with the caravan behind us, stopping where it looked worth stopping. We are both in our sixties. Elize had a hip replaced two years ago and I have a back that announces the weather. We are not adventurers. We are two people who spent forty years being sensible and decided, rather late, to see what the fuss was about.

The woman who planned everything on a screen

I should tell you about Elize and her phone, because it is central to this whole story. My wife, who could not programme a video machine in 1994, has in her retirement become a formidable navigator. She plans the routes. She finds the caravan parks, reads every review, books the sites, locates the fuel stops and the farm stalls and the place three towns ahead that supposedly does the best milk tart in the province. She does all of this on her phone, with her reading glasses on the end of her nose, muttering distances to herself.

And on the first long trip, I nearly ruined all of it, because I had set the car up like a man who last thought seriously about his car in about 2008.

Here was the problem. Elize needed to see the map and read me the turns, but she also needed her hands free to manage the rest of the expedition, and she got terribly carsick looking down at a phone in her lap for hours. So she held the phone up, at arm's length, squinting, her elbow going dead, for the first three hundred kilometres of our grand adventure, while I gripped the wheel and pretended the towing was harder than it was so I would not have to admit the setup was a disaster.

By the first night, in a caravan park near Bela-Bela, we had our first proper argument in years. Not about anything real. About the phone, and the holding of it, and the fact that I had spent money on a caravan and would not spend a cent making the journey to the caravan bearable.

Admitting the car was stuck in the past

Elize was right, and I knew it by the second cup of rooibos. The truth was that the inside of my car had not changed in fifteen years while the world had moved on around it. My phone lived in the cup holder or, more often, slid into the gap beside the seat where it rang from a place I could not reach. The one charging cable I owned was frayed at the connector and only worked if you held it at a particular angle, like tuning an old radio. On a one hour commute none of this had mattered. On a three week journey across the country it was going to drive us both to divorce.

So the next morning, while Elize photographed the caravan park's resident peacock, I sat at the little fold-out table and did something I should have done before we ever left. I worked out, properly, what the car needed to be a place two people could live out of for weeks.

The first thing was somewhere for the phone to live where Elize could see it without holding it. I had always thought of a holder as a flimsy thing that falls off the windscreen on a hot day, but the proper range of Car Phone Holders had moved on as much as everything else, and I ordered one that clamps to the vent and actually stays put. The second thing was the charging, because a phone running maps and taking photographs all day dies by lunch, and a dead phone in Elize's hands is a navigator with no map and a great deal to say about it.

The small things that saved the trip

When the parcel caught up with us a few days later at a post office in a dorp whose name I have forgotten, it changed the whole character of the journey, which is an absurd thing to say about a phone mount and some charging gear, and is nonetheless true.

The holder went on the vent and Elize's phone sat there at eye level, map glowing, her hands free to do all the thousand things she does. The carsickness went away because she was no longer staring down into her lap. And because her phone is one of the newer ones, I had included a couple of MagSafe Chargers in the order, so the phone simply holds itself against the pad and charges while it navigates, no fiddling, no frayed connector held at a magic angle. She clicks it on in the morning and it is full all day.

I also, finally, threw away the terrible old cable that had tormented me for years, and bought a proper set of Cables that live in the caravan, one for each of us and a spare, because the one certainty of travelling is that a cable will fail you in the exact town that has no shop. Elize labelled them with little stickers so we would stop arguing about whose was whose, which tells you everything about forty years of marriage.

What the dashboard taught me about retirement

It is a small and slightly ridiculous thing to build a story around, I know. Phone holders and charging pads are not the stuff of great memoirs. But I have been thinking, on the long quiet roads with the caravan swaying gently behind us, about why it took me so long and why it mattered so much once it was done.

I think I had carried into retirement the same stubbornness that had kept us from buying the caravan for thirty years. A belief that the old way was good enough, that spending on comfort was somehow soft, that holding the phone at arm's length was just what you did. Retirement, it turns out, is the long slow project of unlearning that. Of admitting that making things bearable is not weakness. That a journey is not more meaningful for being more uncomfortable.

Elize navigates us around the country from her little glowing screen at eye level, her hands free, her phone always full, her maps always ready, and she is happier at sixty-four than I have seen her since the children were small. I drive, and I watch the road, and every so often I glance at the phone sitting there doing its quiet work on the dashboard and I think about the week I fought it, and I am faintly embarrassed and entirely content. The caravan still smells of someone else's holidays, underneath. But the car, at last, smells like ours.