TLC, Tears, and Pizza

Warwick's Bunnings was the first real stop, and it set the tone for what the road would actually feel like: less grand adventure, more finding the right taps for a breather hose fix while Sal stood in the car park fending off flies. Anth sorted the repair in the aisle, fitted the parts in the Bunnings car park, and the bus was back to rights before midday. The glamour of nomadic life, week one.

Girraween sat further south, up on the Granite Belt where the country changes. The national park is granite: enormous pale boulders stacked and balanced across the ridgelines, smooth and rounded as though something patient had been shaping them for a very long time. We camped among other travellers, the sites close enough to hear conversation but far enough apart for quiet, and the first evening Sal cried.

It arrived without warning. One moment she was fine; the next, the distance between this campsite and the children in Aroona became a physical thing, sharp and heavy. She did not try to explain it and Anth did not try to fix it. He made pizza in the air fryer instead, which was not a solution but was at least dinner, and by the time the smell of it filled the bus the worst of it had passed. They ate outside in the late light with the granite country turning amber around them, and the conversation found its way back to ordinary things.

The next day was hot. Properly hot, the kind of January heat where even the birds go quiet after ten. We walked the six kilometres to Bald Rock Creek, out past Granite Arch where the rock forms a rough natural bridge overhead, worn smooth. The trail ran through dry forest and across open slabs of granite that radiated heat upward. By the turnaround point, where two small tributaries join on their way toward the Murray-Darling system, we were finished. Cooked. The walk back was a matter of putting one foot ahead of the other and thinking about the shower.

The recirculating shower was one of the build's better decisions. We set it up outside the bus with the afternoon still blazing, cool water in a closed loop, standing in the open air while the heat pressed in from every direction. It washed the dust and the day off in equal measure. Sal went to bed early that night, tired in the particular way that heat and emotion together produce. Anth stayed up a while, watching the dark settle over the campground.

Morning brought the first load of hand-washing, strung between trees to dry in what was already, by eight o'clock, serious heat. And then the kangaroos. A pair of them, an older male and a younger one, sparring in the open ground beside the camp. They boxed and circled and thumped their tails against the dirt, entirely unconcerned by the audience. Anth got it on video. We watched from the bus, not speaking, just grinning, and for a few minutes the heat and the homesickness and the Bunnings car park were somewhere else entirely.Read more