A Pause Between Journeys

We came back to the bus at Boomer Bay after most of a month away, and it was exactly where we had left it, which is not nothing when you have handed your house to people you met the week before.

Two weeks of that was Japan, with Sydney at either end.

Almost a week of it was with Torrin, who has been there since November 2023 and now has a city, a job, and a functioning life in a language we do not speak. Then Sophie and Shea arrived, not to visit but to stay: the two of them joining him to work the ski season.

So we flew home having watched a second child move to the other side of the world, which is a strange thing to be present for. Not a goodbye at an airport in Australia but a handover in Japan, the four of them sorting out accommodation and start dates while we were still there, already becoming a unit we were not part of. Mack was in Queensland. The family is now on two continents and we are the ones who left first.

Then a flight, and a car park at Boomer Bay, and back to checking battery percentages and finding water.

Then Anth got shingles.

Looking back, it had been coming for a while. There had been something vague toward the end of the trip, the sort of thing you put down to too much walking and not enough sleep, and it was only afterwards that it turned into what it actually was. Nerve pain, a rash following a single band around one side of him, and a fatigue that does not respond to sleeping. The virus sits in you for decades after childhood chickenpox and comes back out when you are run down, and two weeks of walking a foreign country on short nights will do that.

So the fortnight after we got back was not the West Coast, which is where we were headed. It was Chauncy Vale, and a mechanic, and a lot of sitting still.

Chauncy Vale in November is a different reserve to the one we camped in during June. Then it was cold and wet and quiet to the point of eeriness and we had it entirely to ourselves. Now it is green, loud with birds, and warm enough to sit outside. Same site, same trees, and we would not have recognised it.

The bus went in to the truck mechanic for work, which took what it took. While it was up on the hoist Sal sat with her laptop and worked, because the trimester was closing and the last assignments were due, and there is a certain comedy in a woman completing a Masters of Counselling in the waiting area of a heavy vehicle workshop.

People came through.

Finn and Alex turned up and we had coffee and did the exchange that travellers do: where have you been, what broke, what is worth the detour. It is the same conversation we had with Arli and Luke months earlier up at Mersey Forest, and it never gets old, because everybody has a different set of roads behind them.

Then Sue and Sail arrived, who we had never met and sort of knew. Geocachers. We had been signing our name in logs across this state for ten months and had been reading theirs, so the names were familiar even though the faces were not. Sail is presumably a nickname and nobody offered an explanation and we did not ask. That is a strange and pleasant way to meet somebody: you have both been leaving marks in the same containers in the same bush, months apart, without ever crossing paths.

Sal submitted her last assignment sometime that week, and the trimester was done.

First one. Accepted in July on the side of a mountain, started in September, and finished from a bush camp, a mechanic's yard and a series of paddocks with whatever internet was available. Three assignments in the week before Japan, more after, two days of compulsory workshops that cost a flight and a fortnight. She did all of it in a moving vehicle and none of it late.

What was left was small: post office, haircut, the ordinary business of a town day. And then west, which we had been saying for a month.

We drove that road once before, in March, with Grammy and Fran, when we had a schedule and a convoy and three weeks to fit an island into. This time there is nobody waiting and no ferry until June. We can stop wherever we want and stay as long as it holds us.Read more