Should new caravan owners have to show L plates? 

I think "YES" although I suspect it becomes blazingly obvious to onlookers.

After looking and dreaming about owning a caravan and joining the grey nomad set, we finally did it.  We are the proud owners of a Jayco Discovery pop-top caravan with toilet/shower, solar panels, annex, roll-out awning etc. all ready to free-camp if we so desire. 

I am sure the salesman was nervous about selling it to us when we struggled with some of the most basic operations, in particular, pulling out the awning.  HOW HARD CAN IT BE?  I've seen all those TV shows and read all the magazines ....

During the hand-over, I lost the sales guy at "battery switch" - all I heard after that was "blah blah blah" and assumed Steve was taking it all in.  Well, you know what they say about ass-u-me.  I was day-dreaming about sitting out under the awning, sipping a cold Sauvignon Blanc, watching the sunset over a beautiful landscape, eating finger food and chatting to other like-minded grey nomads. 

We decided to do a practice run at home before venturing out in public.  Thank Goodness!  After about 5 attempts we finally got the roll-out awning out.  Don't laugh, it is not as easy as they make out.  Why else would there be so many u-tube videos showing "L" platers how to do it.  We only resorted to u-tube after breaking the little 'brackety' thing.  Obviously we should have googled it earlier.

Actually getting the roof up was a cinch - obviously we must have taken in more than we thought during the handover session.  That was a bonus - we could at least stand up in the caravan and weren't walking around like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

With our first week-end planned, we needed to plug the power lead into the house so we could get the fridge cold.  For those experienced caravanners, I'm sure you know what I'm about to say .... the bloody lead was 15amp on both ends so we couldn't plug it into the house.  That was a bit of a rookie mistake!  Apparently, you can't even just go and get the right one from Bunnings.  Now, that bit of information would have been handy during the hand-over.  Perhaps it was but I was just hearing "blah blah blah".  Eventually, a few phone calls and we got it all sorted out ...