A Hiace in the Mirror

The trucks at Scottsdale had rumbled through most of the night, and we left the RV park under-slept but buzzing. Grammy was arriving in Launceston at three.

The morning was errands. Sal disappeared into a hairdresser's chair for the first time since Queensland, a small act of civilian life that the road makes feel like an event. Anth handled the laundry and the supermarket run, the practical half of the partnership ticking over while the other half got a haircut. By early afternoon the bus was clean, stocked, and parked at Old Mac's Farm, a busy RV stop near the city, louder and more populated than our usual camps but right for the occasion.

Grammy arrived with Fran, her best friend, the two of them in a hired Hiace van and carrying the particular energy of women in their seventies who have made a plan and intend to enjoy every minute of it. We had said goodbye to Grammy in the driveway at Chatsworth eleven weeks earlier, and the farewell had carried real weight, the kind that comes from not knowing when you will see someone again. Now here she was, in Tasmania, ready to travel with us for three weeks through a place she had never been. Fran, who had her own decades of friendship with Grammy and her own appetite for the road, completed the party. The reunion was warm and unhurried and slightly louder than either of us had expected.

That afternoon we drove to Cataract Gorge, which sits improbably close to Launceston's centre, a deep gorge with a chairlift spanning its width. We rode it across, the gorge dropping away beneath us, and walked back over the suspension bridge at a pace that suited four rather than two. Grammy and Fran were not slow, but they were sensible, and the walk was shorter than our usual range. It did not matter. The company changed the shape of the day in a way that extra kilometres would not have, and the coffee at the cafe afterwards tasted better for being shared across a larger table.

Back at the camp we spread the maps out on the bus table and planned the next few days together, the route south marked in pen, Grammy and Fran leaning in with suggestions and questions that made the planning feel less like logistics and more like anticipation. Dinner was kebabs, which would have been straightforward had the European wasps not arrived in force. We had not dealt with them in Queensland, and their persistence around food was a new education. The meal retreated inside the bus in stages, plates first, then people, then dignity, and we finished eating behind closed doors with the wasps patrolling the empty table outside.

Three weeks ahead, Grammy and Fran and the hired Hiace following the golden bus south. The trip had been two people for eleven weeks. Now it was four, and the extra voices in the evening and the second vehicle in the mirror changed something that we had not realised needed changing until it changed.Read more