Karen Wright: Women stepping up to do caravan towing

Taking up challenge of towing a caravan (photo: Karen Wright)

It was International Women's Day last week and it just so happened that I was taking part in something that as a woman I felt was very empowering! I had booked on to a course that would enable me to tow our caravan with renewed confidence.

I have been caravanning on and off for more than thirty years, but it has been a very rare occurrence for me to take the wheel and tow. I have done it but without much enthusiasm as the idea of it was always quite intimidating.

Last year though I started thinking about it and it occurred to me that if my husband was incapacitated in some way and we were miles from home, what would we do? Granted we have good insurance and that is reassuring but really, why wasn't I prepared to step up and do it myself?

In fact, it is very common that only men do the towing, occasionally I see a woman driving but it is rare. I am curious about this, if we are equal then why do we woman so often shy away from it?

With all that in mind I booked on to a Caravan Maneuvering Course arranged by the Caravan and Motorhome Club. I found a course quite close to home, near York, which is about a forty-minute drive from where I live.

The course was held over a weekend, with a full day on Saturday and a half day on Sunday. There were six of us on the course, four men and two women, and we were all relatively new to towing. Mike, our instructor, was incredible, very firm, very funny and he put us through our paces.

He reminded me of a shepherd, and we were the sheep. The course was mostly practical with some theory in the classroom too. There were three caravans, and we all took turns hooking up our cars and then maneuvering the car and caravan in and out of cones, reversing into mock caravan emplacements and out on the open road, well not a public road but a road set up for the purpose.

At the end of the course, we all were presented with our certificates and we agreed that it had been an empowering couple of days and that we all felt ready and prepared to get behind the wheel and hit the road!