Geocaching Triumphs & Pancake Feasts

Tall Timbers was a free camp on the edge of Smithton, flat and open, with enough RVs scattered across it to suggest the town had a generous view of travellers. We pulled in without much ceremony, planning a quiet couple of days of work before heading for the west coast. Anth had other ideas, or rather the geocaching app did.

We had climbed the Nut that morning, legs already well used by the time we reached Smithton, and a sensible person would have stopped there. Anth left Sal in the bus with a promise of being back soon and set off on foot with the app open. The area had a spread of caches across it, and he came back hours later having found thirteen of them, six of which were brand new hides that no one had reached yet. First to find, six times over. The thirteen kilometres he had covered on top of the Nut made it the longest day on his feet since the trip began, and the particular grin he wore in the doorway was the grin of a man who has spent the afternoon doing something pointless in exactly the way he wanted.

Sal was unimpressed in the affectionate way that partners are unimpressed when the other one has been gone three times longer than promised. She had worked through the afternoon and was ready for the evening to begin, which meant the shower first and pancakes after. The recirculating shower set up outside the bus and did its job, washing off the dust and the distance, and then Sal made her banana and chocolate-chip protein pancakes for the second time on the trip, folded through with protein ice cream, served on the back step of the bus in the last of the light.

Anth ate like someone who had climbed a volcanic plug and walked thirteen kilometres in a single day. Which he had. The pancakes held up. Sal watched him finish and said nothing, because the empty plate was the only review that mattered.

Two days of work followed, laptops open, the online business ticking over, the west coast waiting. Tasmania's western shore was the next pull, wilder and less visited than the north, and the road toward it would take them off the settled circuit they had been following since Devonport. They packed up at Tall Timbers without looking back, which was itself a sign that the life was working: the camps were starting to feel like pauses rather than destinations.Read more