Canberra's Borrowed Comfort

The rhythm of our nomadic life had become a dance of divergence and reunion, paths splitting only to weave back together in ways we could never quite predict.

Sal pressed northward from Gundagai, the bus swallowing kilometres through undulating countryside where the hills rolled like golden waves frozen mid-swell. The town of Yass appeared and receded in her mirrors, a brief punctuation of civilisation before the road curved south toward Canberra's northern reaches. Somewhere ahead, Jan waited. Best friend. Safe harbour. The kind of person whose door opens before you've even knocked.

Meanwhile, Anth sat in a sterile waiting room, fluorescent lights humming their institutional song as he completed yet another screening appointment. A plane to catch, eight hours to kill, and the peculiar limbo of airport lounges stretched before him. His Virgin lounge access would transform what might have been tedious waiting into something almost comfortable, though comfort felt relative when your heart was already in Canberra.

Sal arrived at Jan's just before lunch, the bus settling into its temporary home with a grateful sigh of air brakes. Almost simultaneously, though separated by hundreds of kilometres, Anth was navigating Melbourne Airport's familiar corridors. The hours crawled past in that strange airport way, where time seems to move through treacle.

Jan and her daughter Jess welcomed Sal with the easy warmth of long friendship, conversations picking up mid-sentence as if no time had passed at all. Later, the three of them piled into a car and headed for Canberra Airport, headlights cutting through the darkness as midnight approached.

The flight was delayed. Of course it was. Anth finally emerged into the arrivals hall just before midnight, travel-worn but grinning. Our separation, that looming thirty-day stretch we'd steeled ourselves for, had collapsed into a single night. The universe, it seemed, had other plans.

Under Jan's roof, we rediscovered the strange luxury of traditional walls and ceilings, of rooms that didn't rock in the wind, of showers that didn't require strategic water conservation. Yet even as we settled into this borrowed domesticity, the phone rang with news that would test our hard-won flexibility.

The trial facility needed Anth back for a re-screen. A common enough occurrence in the clinical trial world, but geography had shifted beneath us. Flying back to Melbourne from Canberra, disrupting the fragile equilibrium we'd just established: the calculation didn't balance. Anth withdrew from the trial with surprisingly little anguish. We had become fluid creatures, adapting to circumstance like water finding its level. What might once have felt like failure now registered simply as redirection.

With unexpected time on our hands and the rare luxury of Bunnings access, Anth finally tackled a project that had been nagging at him for months. Our portable shower, that essential piece of nomadic infrastructure, had been languishing since its pump failed back in Tasmania. The parts had accumulated slowly during our travels, gathered like puzzle pieces waiting for the right moment to assemble.

Now, in Jan's driveway, that moment arrived. Anth worked with quiet concentration, replacing the failed pump with a high-quality, high-flow unit built to last years rather than months. The upgrade didn't stop there. A generous rain shower head replaced the original's miserly trickle. But the real innovation was the recirculating system, transforming our shower from simple convenience to genuine luxury. We tested it with the giddy satisfaction of engineers watching their creation come to life, already anticipating the moment we'd be back on the road with hot water cascading properly for the first time in months.

Evenings found us gathered around Jan's television, drawn into *Deadloch*, a dark comedy set in Tasmania that she'd discovered and insisted we watch. The show's Tasmanian setting stirred something unexpected in our chests. We'd been gone less than a year, yet watching those familiar landscapes flickering across the screen triggered a nostalgia so acute it surprised us. Tasmania had become our spiritual home, its wild coastlines and ancient forests imprinted somewhere deep. Even fictional representations pulled at threads we hadn't realised were so tightly woven.

As our Canberra days settled into comfortable rhythm, Anth's restlessness began to surface. The wanderlust that had driven us onto the road in the first place doesn't simply switch off because you're parked somewhere pleasant. His feet grew itchy, that familiar urge to move prickling beneath his skin.

He first secured a spot in the final cohort of the trial he'd just withdrawn from, a date set for the new year with screening in a few days. But between now and then stretched empty days, and empty days demanded filling. The decision crystallised quickly: he would take the bus a short distance out of Canberra, find a quiet camp, and spend a few days alone with the horizon. Sal would stay with Jan, their friendship deserving more time than our constant movement usually allowed.

It was a small separation, measured in days rather than weeks. But it spoke to something essential about how we'd learned to live: together when together served us, apart when apart made sense, always trusting that the threads connecting us could stretch without breaking.

The road called, and Anth answered. Sal stayed, wrapped in the warmth of old friendship and borrowed walls. And somewhere between them, our story continued to write itself in the language of flexibility and trust, of showers finally fixed and trials withdrawn from, of television shows that made us homesick for places we'd never truly left.Read more