Nobody Camps Here in July
Jul 28–Aug 1 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 10 °C
There was nobody at Mannus Lake when we came in off the dirt, and the few who turned up over the next four nights did not stay long. We had crossed back over the Murray into New South Wales a few kilometres past the cattle, and it was no great run from there to the turn-off, then a few kilometres of dirt with a state forest of pines standing dark along our left. Not many people camp the southern states in July. It suited us exactly.
We took the best position in the place, right on the water's edge, and turned the bus so the windows faced out over it, which is a thing we now do without discussing. Grammy put her van into a similar spot. Mannus Lake is small enough to take in at a glance: farming country on the far shore with cattle grazing along it, and a few hundred metres of cold water this time between them and anything of ours. Behind us stood the pines. We had two and a half weeks in hand between Albury and Canberra with nothing owed on any of it, and this was going to be one of the long stays.
The wind came off the forest rather than the water, down over the pines with a bite in it that went through everything we owned, because somewhere out beyond that dark line of trees were the Snowy Mountains. Most mornings the ground came up white with frost. Most mornings the lake had fog lying on it as well, low and in no hurry, and it would stay long after the winter sun cleared the trees, thinning from the edges inward, going nowhere, until at some point we would look up and find it gone without either of us having seen it go.
Sal finished her last assignments at Mannus. Two years of them, near enough without a break, carried through more camps than we could count and through Japan as well, where she sat down to study in a country she had flown to for her children. Torrin was living there; Sophie and Shea had come too. She worked anyway. And then, at a small lake in New South Wales in the cold, she finished the final one. What was left of the degree was the placement, and the placement was in Canberra. She did not make much of it. Something went out of her shoulders that had been sitting in them a long time, and that was the whole of the ceremony.
What it left behind was the mornings. The bird life at Mannus was better than the place had any need to be, blue fairy wrens working the grass in short hops, red-capped robins, finches we could not put a name to, coots out on the water and pelicans riding it, and for the first time in two years there was nothing at all in the day that had to be done before we could sit and watch them. She had earned that on the Thursday. She had four mornings of it.
Then Sophie rang. She was going to Canberra to see Jess, who is Jan's daughter, who grew up alongside her, and in whose house we had stayed the last time we were in the capital. Our plan had us arriving after Sophie left. It was a perfectly good plan and we gave it up inside a minute, because two and a half weeks of unclaimed road is a fine thing to own and a small thing to spend on a daughter, and neither of us needed to talk it through.
The day before we left we took the bikes back out along the track we had ridden in on. The forest close to camp had been picked clean by whoever came before us, but a couple of kilometres down there was more than we could carry, and we filled two bags with it. Anth did the cutting with the bowsaw, a handmade Bear Essentials that has been aboard since Tasmania and has taken apart more fallen timber than either of us could account for. Grammy stayed at the lake. We rode back slower than we had come out, bags balanced, the cold coming up off the ground and into our hands.
Four nights, and we could have stayed a fortnight without using the place up. The camp after this one had been pencilled in for a week; we cut it to a single night, long enough to see what it was and no longer, and then the city. Two and a half weeks had come down to that.
It was a strange way to spend a freedom she had only just finished earning, and neither of us minded in the least. We went on the fifth morning, and the cattle on the far shore did not look up.Read more
He Brought Them All Back
Jul 27–28 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C
The road that runs east out of Jindera was new to all three of us, which was most of the reason we took it. We filled both water tanks at the town waterfill point first, on the principle that you never know, and then pointed the convoy towards Canberra. Not that Canberra was close. It sat a fortnight of camps away at least, and between the sports oval at Jindera and the start of Sal's final placement lay the last genuinely loose days we had, the ones with nothing booked into them and no station platform waiting at the end of them. We intended to spend them slowly.
The Murray met us wide. Held back behind the weir it had given up behaving like a river altogether, lying flat and pale right across the country, and we crossed it on the Bethanga Bridge, out of New South Wales and into Victoria. On the far side the road bent around to follow the shoreline. A sign announced it as the Great River Road, which told us plainly enough what it hoped to grow up to be. Victoria already has one famous drive, and the ambition here was not subtle. The country did not need the help.
We followed it for an hour or more, and somewhere along the way the water pulled itself back in. The flat sheet of it narrowed and quickened and became a river again, moving properly, with banks close enough to speak across. We had camped on the Murray before, at Barmah in the first weeks of all this and later at Gunbower and Moama and Echuca, and we had known it there as a slow brown thing in no hurry to arrive anywhere. This was the same water, a long way upstream of ever learning that patience.
The camp we had chosen had been flagged as possibly closed, flood damage, so we drove towards it with a backup already marked. It was closed. The gate was chained and the sign on it had weathered enough to suggest it had been that way a while. We turned around without much ceremony and drove the eighteen kilometres on to the next one, which the maps call Gadds Bend and the signage calls Walwa Camping Reserve, and which was open, empty, and set down close to the water.
Three or four days, we said. At least three or four. The river ran hard past the camp, quick and cold and clean, and there was nobody else in the reserve.
There was, however, a herd of cattle.
They were not wild and they were not shy. They had plainly been camped alongside before and had drawn the reasonable conclusion that people mean interest and possibly food, and they came at the vehicles nose first, the way children come at anything new. A cow leaning its head on the side of the bus at close range sounds precisely like somebody knocking to be let in. Grammy's van got the same attention. Whatever was hers and whatever was ours, they wanted a closer look at all of it, and within the hour the smell of cattle had worked its way into everything we owned.
The portable solar panels were the real trouble. Laid flat on the ground to catch the low winter sun, they sat at exactly the height and angle of something a cow might reasonably decide to stand on. Anth spent the afternoon on his feet. Out of the bus, over to the panels, arms up, watch them amble off four or five metres, back inside, wait, out again.
Grammy was better at it. Several times she went at them properly and they took her seriously, wheeling away up the bank and out into the paddock, and for half an hour at a stretch the reserve would be quiet and ours again.
It was during one of those half hours that Anth walked off up the track to look for a geocache. He was most of the way back before he worked out, from the sound behind him, that he had acquired the entire herd. They came up the track after him in a loose column, unhurried and entirely committed, and he delivered every last one of them back to the bus and Grammy's van. Half an hour of her work, undone in the time it took him to walk home.
By dusk we both understood we were not going to win this, though neither of us said so aloud, because saying it aloud meant giving up the three or four days.
They were still there after dark. We lay in the bus and listened to them breathing on the other side of the panel, to the wet tearing of grass being pulled up somewhere near the front wheel, and to the occasional heavy shift of an animal deciding to lean on something.
We said it in the morning, over coffee. One night. There was another camp an hour further on, and nothing here we could defend, except the river, and the river was not the problem.
Before we pulled out, Anth took his sling down to the shallows. He chose the stones slowly, small ones, smooth ones, turning them over in his palm and rejecting most, and then stood on the Victorian bank and threw them across. Forty-five minutes of it. The stones went up and out and came down into New South Wales, one after another, and not one of them accomplished a single useful thing.
The cattle watched from the top of the bank, entirely unbothered, having already won. Anth picked one more stone out of the shallows, weighed it, and put it into another state. Then we pulled out, and left them the reserve.Read more
Four Hours Facing Strangers
Jul 22–27 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C
The Jindera Recreation Reserve was chosen for none of the usual reasons. It sat around a country sports oval with only a couple of other campers scattered about, and its single virtue was that it lay twenty minutes from the railway station at Albury. We picked our spot with Grammy in mind, room enough for the bus and her van to sit side by side while we were gone. For four days that was all the place had to do: hold everything still.
One night there, and in the morning Grammy drove us in, with a detour to the post office for a Prime Day order that had been waiting on us. A new pair of Crocs for Anth. He had succumbed to them not long after we first hit the road and had never been talked out of them since, wearing them through every taunt that came his way and refusing to consider any other camp shoe. Sal had spent two years declining to share the enthusiasm. Then someone made them fleece lined and white, and there they were at the counter, a pair each. She joined the dark side without much of a fight, and her feet, cold since Nangar, stopped complaining.
We said our temporary goodbyes at the station and boarded with every intention of working through the four hours south.
The seats faced each other, which is how we came to be looking at Mat and Clouds. They were strangers to us and, as it turned out, to each other as well, introduced a moment earlier by the seating plan. Clouds was short for Claudia. She told us to use the short one. Mat had lived in Japan, which was the door in, and once it opened the conversation ran without a pause for the rest of the journey, from Tokyo out through work and family and, by the end, mental health, the sort of ground people usually take months to reach. No laptops came out. When Southern Cross was called it felt less like arriving than being interrupted. Four hours, and we stepped onto the platform with two new friends.
A tram carried us to Laneways, a hotel booked on price alone and better than its price by a distance, the room well appointed, the welcome real.
Torrin came to us that evening. He had moved down to Melbourne a few weeks earlier to improve his odds of landing a trial, running the same arithmetic Anth had run for years: money earned lying still so that something else could be paid for. In Torrin's case the something else was Canada, and snow, and Shea. We had farewelled him at Grammy's not many weeks before and had not expected him again so soon. We ate at an Indonesian place around the corner, too much of it, and walked back slow.
In the morning Sal walked to her workshop, a few minutes down the footpath.
Anth and Torrin spent the day out in the grid of the city, picking up geocaches Anth had missed on earlier trial visits, when Melbourne had been somewhere he passed through on his own. Later they played video games. Anth had come round to something over the past year, not gladly at first: that a good share of his son's life now happened in there, and if he wanted more hours with him, he would have to go in and meet him where he was. So he went. He was not much good at it. That was never the point.
Dinner came in a bag that night rather than a restaurant. Afterwards Torrin caught his train back to the temporary place he was staying.
Sal's last day of workshops came and went like any other. She walked back up the same footpath and that was the end of it. No more flights to Brisbane. No more trains to Melbourne. No more of the two-year rhythm that had decided where the bus could be and when, that had set our departures and shortened our stays and put a date on every stretch of road we had planned since Tasmania. Two years of arranging a life around a calendar somebody else kept, finished on a Saturday afternoon in a rented room with nobody watching. She said it felt surreal. Nothing had marked it. There had been no reason to expect anything would.
Torrin met us early on the Sunday for breakfast and walked us back to Southern Cross. He waited on the concourse until our train came in, which he did not have to do. Goodbyes to him have not got easier for the practice.
The ride north was quieter. We had the work we had meant to do on the way down and now no excuse left, so some of it got done, and the country went past the other way. Whatever fills an outbound journey was not in this one.
Grammy was at Albury, in the same place she had dropped us, and drove us back out.
We took one more night at the reserve rather than travel in the dark. The bus stood where we had left it, her van alongside, the oval black and empty past them, everything as still as we had asked the place to keep it. Sal's white Crocs went by the door with the rest of the shoes. Whatever came next, nobody was expecting her anywhere.Read more
Water That Owed Nothing
Jul 21–22 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C
We drove down off the hilltop that had been ours alone these last nights, the bus tilting as it always did on rougher roads, and pointed south again, still running against the winter tide of rigs headed north for the warmth. Wagga Wagga was the next town day, and town days had their own rhythm by now: a list, a division of labour, the small machinery of keeping a bus and a van on the road. This one belonged mostly to Grammy. She needed a new phone, which meant two different stores and the patience to match, so while Sal took the food list and topped up what the last week had emptied, Anth stayed with his mum and worked through it with her.
He was the one who sorted these things now. The signing in, the transferring across, the shop assistant explaining what a woman of seventy-odd already half knew. Anth stood beside her and got it done, no fuss, and when the phone was finally working in her hand we found coffee and a steak lunch and sat in the ordinary sunshine of a Wagga afternoon with the errand behind us.
Then Bunnings, for a few bits to improve the electrical system in Grammy's van. Anth had built the bus's own set-up over the long months of the conversion, every wire and fuse of it, and he could not look at her van now without seeing where it fell short: a little more capacity here, a neater run there. It was not sentiment. A thing could be made to work better, and he was the one who knew how, and she had the good sense to let him at it. That was how the two of them had always got on. Practical people, both.
Town done, the list spent, it was only twenty minutes on to the night's stop. Not a wild camp, not the kind of place we would have chosen if choosing were the only thing that mattered, but a recreation reserve on the edge of the small town of The Rock, just south of Wagga, the great hill that gives the town its name standing over it all, dark against the last of the light. We pulled in, the bus and Grammy's van, and levelled up on the grass.
What the reserve had, and what the wild places never did, was free hot showers. There is a shower in the bus, a recirculating one, the same water pumped warm and round again, and we had leaned on it a couple of times through the dry country behind us: careful, adequate, never quite enough. This was a different thing altogether. This was hot water that kept coming and asked nothing back, and after weeks of counting every litre it was a small extravagance to stand under it and simply let it run, the drum of it loud in the little block, steam fogging the mirror, no part of us doing sums. We walked back across the grass pink and warm and faintly amazed at ourselves.
It was short and sweet, that stop. In the morning we woke refreshed, the hill still there through the windscreen, and set off south toward the last camp before Melbourne, where the road would soon narrow to trains and workshops and another parting. But that was tomorrow's weight. This morning there was only the bus and Grammy's van nosing back onto the highway, her new phone working in her hand, and the clean, uncomplicated feeling of a night's real water still on the skin.Read more
Against the Northbound Tide
Jul 19–21 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
Twenty minutes was all it took to trade the farm tracks for bitumen. The dust settled behind us, Grammy's van holding its place in the mirror, and the road ran south through Young and on into Cootamundra, where we stopped for fuel and little else. There was a train to catch at Albury in a few days, and the knowledge of it rode quietly in the cab with us, the way a deadline does once the drifting has a date on it again. For months there had been no end to anything. Now the road bent toward one.
We were going the wrong way, or the right way, depending how you counted. Everyone else was heading north. We had been passing them for weeks, the vans and caravans strung out toward Queensland and its warmth, and every one of them going north left one more place empty for us in the cold behind them. Bethungra Dam was one of those places. In summer it would fill with families and boats and the noise of them. We came to a foreshore we had almost to ourselves, a scatter of empty sites and the water lying flat and grey under a low sky, the stillness of somewhere caught between its seasons.
We drove the water's edge slowly, and then we saw it, a thin sinuous track folding up the hill above the dam. Anth looked at Sal. Sal looked at the track. Up we went.
The view from the top earned the climb, which was fortunate, because the top was nowhere near level. We worked at it a while, chocks and patience, the bus tipping one way then the other before we called it close enough. We gave up chasing a perfectly level floor a long time ago. There are more pressing questions in a day than whether a marble would roll off the bench. Whether the coffee is close. Whether the bus is facing the right way to take the sunrise on one end and hand back the sunset from the other. Get those two right and the floor can lean a little. And the view held up its end. The dam lay below, the road we had come in on threading north through paddocks gone pale with winter, the whole country tipping slowly toward evening.
We left the bus and Grammy's van up on the perch and took the bikes down. The switchbacks we had ground up in low gear gave everything back on the descent, freewheels ticking, corners arriving fast, the dam swinging into view and out again. A few kilometres around the water and we were done, and then of course there was the way back, which the hill had kept for itself. Our legs were honest with us about the price of the fun. We stood on the pedals for the last of it and arrived at the top with nothing left to say and a good deal to feel.
Then the sunsets. They had followed us from the last camp, the same red climbing out of the west night after night, and here they found us again. We made a point of being out for it, the cold sliding down off the hill as the colour came up, dust and cut grass sharp in the air. The sky over the dam went from bruise to ember to a deep burning red, and the water took the colour and held it, doubled, so that for a few minutes the hill stood between two fires and we stood between them too, mugs going cold in our hands, saying nothing, watching a thing that asked nothing of us in return.
Only two nights. That was the arithmetic, and the arithmetic had Albury in it, and after Albury the train, and after the train Sal's last workshop in Melbourne. Her very last. She had done this whole degree from the strangest desks, from lookouts and riverbanks and the little swing-out table Anth had fitted in the cab, the work folded in around wherever the bus happened to stop. One piece was left now. The placement, back in Canberra, where the cold would be waiting, the real kind, the kind that gets into a bus overnight and stays. The end of it was close enough to see. Neither of us said so aloud. We watched the red go out of the sky instead, and Grammy's light came on in the van behind us, and the dam went dark and still, and there was a train to catch soon enough, and there was still tonight.Read more
The Company of Sheep
Jul 16–19 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
The last thing we heard at Nangar was Terarra Creek, and we did not notice losing it until we had been driving for an hour.
That is how it goes. A place gives you a sound for a week, you stop hearing it, and then it is behind you and the cab is full of engine and road and nothing else. We came down off the goat country with the heater on, and the morning did its usual business of turning us from people camped somewhere into people going somewhere.
Cowra took a few minutes. Then the bitumen ran out.
What followed was dirt, and dust, and more dirt, the roads narrowing and squaring off into the grid that farming country uses, right angle after right angle, a gum on the corner, a mailbox at the gate. Somewhere in there the country changed hands. We had spent weeks inside national parks, where the ground is left to get on with whatever it wants; now every hectare had a fence around it and a job to do. Grammy held station in our mirrors, her van going the same yellow as the dust we were making for her.
Tout Park sat on a bend, and the bend was most of what it had. Flat ground, room for two, nothing provided and nothing promised. Whatever we had expected of it, the thing worth having was there when we pulled in: the paddocks fell away west and simply kept going, ridge after ridge of pale winter grass, no roof or tower anywhere in it. There was nothing we had to be early for.
There was also nobody there to negotiate with, so we took all of it. We spent a good while longer than the parking required, shifting the bus a degree at a time until the windows held the whole of the view, and Grammy did the same beside us, her nose turned the same way as ours. Two homes on a bend in a dirt road, both pointed at a paddock.
She had bought that van at seventy four. Anth watched her settle it, level it, switch off, and kept the thought to himself: that a convoy is a thing with a number of nights in it, and nobody is ever told the number.
We had swapped kangaroos for sheep.
At Nangar the company had been kangaroos and wallaroos out on the flat at dusk, goats coming down the hill in the afternoons, a fox once in broad daylight among the cypress pines. Here it was sheep, and sheep keep different hours. They do not arrive at last light and they do not leave at dawn. They are simply present, all day and most of the night, complaining at length about something happening in the next paddock over. They sounded like a queue that had been waiting a long time. By the second morning we could pick one of them out of the rest, an old ewe somewhere south of us with a voice like a gate.
The days were small and we let them be. Coffee first, always, though at this time of year that meant coffee carried back to bed and drunk under the covers. The ground gave up its heat the moment the sun went and was slow about handing it back, and the bus held that cold well into the morning, so we held the cups instead and let the day get on with warming itself. The firewood we burned had been riding with us since Wanda Wandong, topped up with what we inherited at Nangar, so the fire each evening was made of two camps we had already left. Its smoke went straight up in air that had stopped moving.
A few travellers found the bend while we were there. Not many. They came in off the dirt in the last of the light and they were gone before the second coffee was made. None of them stayed more than a night.
We knew the habit without ever having taken it up. Two and a half years out here and we have always moved as little as we could get away with and stayed as long as we wanted to. We know what the other way buys, which is distance. What it costs is everything a place does on its second day. On the first day you get the view. On the second you find out what the light does to it between four and five o'clock. On the third you know where the ewe is.
And every dusk, the west burned.
It began as nothing, a wash of pink over the ridges that we nearly talked through. Then the far edge of the farmland caught, and the red came up off it and took the whole western half of the sky, and the paddocks underneath went the colour of the sky, and the fence posts and the sheep and Grammy's van all stood in it. We sat with our cups and stopped talking. Three nights, and it did it three times, and by the third we knew to be out of the chairs and standing before it started.
Canberra was somewhere ahead of us. So was the rest of the winter, and the cold that was already making a point of itself, and a diary that would want us back eventually. None of it reached the bend. It is a rare thing to be able to answer the question of how long by saying: until we have had enough.
Long after the colour had gone, and the fire was down to coals we were too warm and too lazy to feed, the sheep were still out there in the dark, saying to one another whatever it was they had been saying since we arrived.
By the third night we had stopped hearing them.Read more
Creek Talk and Cypress Pines
Jul 9–16 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
We packed up in sunshine and rolled out of Goobang National Park with the bus pointed at Parkes. Winter was no longer arriving; it had arrived, and it had started setting the terms. What we needed from the week ahead was simple and not negotiable: sun on the bus, wood for the fire, and a place that would hold us while the cold deepened. Everything else was decoration.
Parkes got barely a glance. We had stood beneath the great white dish in the January of our first year, in thirty seven degree heat, Sal under it for the first time in thirty eight years. Grammy had seen it on her own adventures. So one of the most famous radio telescopes in the world became, on this pass, simply the place we topped up the water, and none of us felt the loss. Winter travel narrows a town to its essentials, and it narrows the traveller too, in a way that feels less like going without and more like finally knowing what you need.
From there we swung south east through Eugowra, a small town carrying a large story, the site of Australia's biggest gold heist, bushrangers relieving the gold escort of its cargo back in the 1860s. Twenty minutes past the town we turned in to Nangar National Park and the country changed almost at once. Goobang had been what we thought of as typical Australian bush, dry open eucalypt forest. Here, logging and grazing in the decades before the park was declared had left broad green clearings, and the slopes were dark with cypress pines, denser than gum country, holding their shade differently. The road in crossed Terarra Creek again and again. None of the fords ran deep, but each splash of water under the wheels felt like a small yes, this way.
At the campsite we did a slow loop and settled at the base of a steep hill. Sun enough, space enough, a week's worth of both. The brief was met before the kettle boiled.
Then the place did the thing we had not asked for and could not have ordered. It let us in.
The creek ran close to the bus and did not stop talking all week, and the frogs joined it every night. One evening we walked down with torches and found the water crowded with life, yabbies backing away from the beam with their claws raised, native tadpoles stirring the shallows. We stood on the bank longer than the cold strictly allowed, two torch beams on a whole society going about its business a few steps from where we slept, and walked back up to the bus feeling less like visitors than we had that morning.
One clear day we took the bikes out along the trail to Dripping Falls. Mobs of grey kangaroos and common wallaroos lifted their heads as we passed and kept loose company with us the whole way, grazing along unhurried, as if riding beside us was simply what the morning held. We came back to find one of the two other campers gone and a small pile of firewood left where they had been. Anth split the logs and stacked them beside the few we had bought at Wanda Wandong, and the arithmetic of the week changed. We now had wood to see us out. There is a comfort in a full wood stack with the cold coming down that sits somewhere older than this trip, older than us, and no town luxury has ever quite matched it.
The neighbours kept their routines around ours. Every afternoon a herd of goats worked its way along the flank of the steep hill beside us, bleating as they went, a procession so regular we could nearly have set the clock by it. Through the middle of the day a lone fox wandered the cypress pines, nosing for leftovers that were not there, entirely unconcerned by the bus parked so close. Human campers came and went, the way they always did at the places we stayed longer. The animals stayed, and so did we, and by midweek it was hard to say who was keeping an eye on whom.
The nights kept getting colder. Somewhere in the dark hours the thought would surface of Canberra, still a few weeks down the road, and how cold it would be by the time we finally made it there. It was not quite worry. It was more the old habit of leaning ahead of ourselves, and each night the fire made the same quiet argument against it: you are warm now, you are here now. Most nights we let the fire win.
The day before we were due to leave, we tackled the hill. The goats had already drawn the map, their trails switching back and forth across the slope, and we followed them upward until the ground eased and we stood on the crest. Below us Terarra Valley opened out whole: the clearings, the dark pine ridges, the thread of the creek we had crossed so many times on the way in, the bus small at the hill's foot. A week of our life lay there in one look, and for a moment the week looked back. We stood in the wind and let the valley be larger than we were.
Then we followed the gentle ridge down, the goat trails handing us from one to the next, and walked into camp. The creek was still talking. It would go on talking after we had gone, to the goats and the fox and whoever pulled in next, and somehow that was the comfort of it. We had not owned the week. We had been allowed it.Read more
The Pumpkin We Carried South
Jul 3–9 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C
Town days are a transaction. We hand over a morning, sometimes a whole day, and in exchange the bush lets us come back with full cupboards and full tanks. Some travellers love a town for its own sake, and good luck to them. For us Dubbo was a list, and every line crossed off it brought the trees a little closer.
We divided and conquered. Sal and Grammy took the groceries while Anth chased the post office and the scattered handful of supplies that always seem to live at opposite ends of any town. The bus zigzagged across Dubbo, back and forth, sometimes retracing its own route entirely. A bite to eat, diesel in the tank, water topped up, and the town finally let us go. By then the afternoon was leaning towards evening. Our camp lay forty-five minutes away according to the GPS, which meant an hour. Five and a half tonnes of bus does not like to be rushed, and we stopped asking it to long ago.
The turn off the Newell felt like a held breath released. Wanda Wandong, in Goobang National Park: of every camp on this run south, the only one that overlaps the first trip, that January of 2024 when the whole country still lay ahead of us and we barely trusted the life we had chosen. We pulled in not quite on dark and did a slow lap of what remained. School holidays. We had to laugh at ourselves. Our children are adults now, one in a van of her own, one just off a New Zealand trail, and the school calendar that once governed everything has become a foreign country. These days we discover term dates the way we discovered them that evening, by arriving at a national park full of other people's children. Still, the sites were spaced well apart, and we took the best of what was left.
That night we finally ate the pumpkin. It had ridden with us since Maidenwell, our very first stop after Grammy's, pressed into our hands by a generous fellow traveller before the trip had properly begun. For a month it travelled quietly aboard, ripening at its own pace while the country outside turned from red dust to river gums and the nights grew teeth. Into the instant pot it went, then the blender, and out came the most amazing pumpkin soup: thick, sweet, steaming against the cold air, the bus smelling of it for hours. A stranger's kindness from the start of the leg, finishing its journey in our bowls a month down the road. Exactly the thing for the weather.
We gave the first site two nights. It sat in shade, and though we chased the sun's patches through the trees with the portable panels, shifting them every hour like slow sundials, the cold settled in beneath the canopy and would not leave. So we moved, to the exact spot we had camped in that first summer. Full sun, and full earshot of the holiday children a site or two over. An acceptable trade, we all agreed, mostly while standing in the sunshine with our eyes shut.
The memory of that summer stay kept surfacing. Same clearing, different weather, different people standing in it. In January 2024 we had sweated through a washing day here and kept a respectful distance from the biggest redback either of us had ever seen. We were sixteen days into this life then, still checking over our shoulders for the catch. Now we came back in jumpers and beanies, two and a half years of road behind the bus, and the same clearing held us as easily in winter as it had in heat.
A trail map promised a ten kilometre loop, and from camp the country looked flat in every direction, so we called it easy and got the bikes down. The trail had other ideas. It ran out to fifteen kilometres and found every hill the horizon had been hiding, and our legs, soft from a slow winter, were honest with us about it. We worked hard. Conversation thinned out on the climbs. But rolling back into camp, sweat cooling on our backs, the satisfaction was out of all proportion to the distance, the way it always is when a thing asks more of you than advertised and you pay anyway.
Then, over a few days, the park emptied. The holiday families packed down one by one, the noisy children beside us among the first to go, and quiet moved back in behind them like water finding its level. Everyone was heading north, chasing the warmth up the map in the great winter migration. We watched them go and decided to stay a few extra days precisely because they had. Soon only one other camper remained, a single tent far off through the trees.
We were heading the other way, of course. South, into the winter, against the whole tide of sensible traffic. But the arithmetic suited us: every week from here the camps would grow quieter, the firewood would matter more, and the fire would pull our three chairs in a little closer. That evening it had the clearing almost to itself, smoke rising straight into the still dark, and the last tent's light small among the trees.Read more
Halfway to Dubbo
Jul 2–3 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C
The run to Dubbo was only a few hours, but we had learned long ago not to swallow a drive in one gulp when we could halve it. Our days had no fixed shape any more beyond the one Sal's study gave them. Her placement hours and her sessions were the only fixed points we had left; the driving, the camps, the where and the when all arranged themselves around those. So it was that we were not yet an hour down the road when we turned off it again, into a park on the edge of Coonabarabran, and Sal settled in for an online counselling session that would run ninety minutes.
The hour and a half was not wasted. It gave us time to run down a bin at last for the rubbish we had been carrying for days, and time to sit with the phone and work out where we would sleep. It was proper inland winter now, the kind of cold that sits in the shade and does not lift, and we did the small chores of the day with collars up.
There was something we had come to like in a stop like this. Somewhere on the other end of Sal's screen sat people we would never meet and could not name, and yet their ninety minutes set the clock for the whole of ours, decided which town we ate in and which paddock we parked in. Our free and shapeless life now bent itself, without complaint, around the work of somebody else being helped.
Mendooran came up on the screen as the answer. It sat almost exactly where we wanted it, a short hop past the halfway mark, close enough that the morning's run into Dubbo would be under an hour. When Sal came out of the bus, blinking, done, we pointed the nose that way.
The camp was nothing more than a park in the middle of the little town, and we were far from the only ones to have thought of it. A scatter of vans and camper rigs had settled on the grass, other travellers running the same arithmetic we had, splitting their own long drives at the same convenient middle. We nodded to a couple of them, the small free-camp courtesy, and they nodded back. Nothing fancy. A mown patch, a few tables, a quiet street beyond. But it would do, and doing was all we asked of it.
We pulled up beside one of the tables. A minute later Grammy's van came in behind us and settled alongside, the convoy of two drawn back into one small huddle at day's end, and she leaned out with news that changed the shape of the evening. She had a beef stew on. It had been cooking in her Dreampot all day, sealed and slow while the kilometres passed beneath it, needing no fire and no power, only the long patient heat it kept to itself. When she lifted the lid the smell of it reached us across the cold air, beef and onion and hours of dark gravy, and any thought of our own small dinner went quietly out the window. How could we say no.
We did not say no. We ate at the table as the light went out of the sky and the cold came down harder, three of us and a pot that had ridden the whole day to be ready at exactly this hour. It was, without exaggeration, delicious, the particular gift of a hot meal at the end of a day spent mostly waiting, and better still for being one that neither of us had cooked. We went back for more. We were not shy about it.
Afterwards, full and slow, we said our goodnights and crossed the few steps back to our own bus. Somewhere a dog barked once and gave it up. The town had gone quiet in the way small towns do early, a light on in a house or two, the road empty. Tomorrow would be a town day, Dubbo and its errands, water and fuel and a supermarket and whatever else a town is for. But that was tomorrow. Tonight there was only the warmth of a good stew sitting easy in us, and the dark settling over a borrowed patch of grass we would leave in the morning and never think of again, and the quiet knowledge that this, too, was the life. Not the grand days. This one.Read more
Old Neighbours on the Horizon
Jun 25–Jul 2 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C
The short town day behind us, the last of the Walgett resupply stowed, we carried on. It was not long before we swung east again and left the bitumen, the tyres settling into that lower, looser note gravel gives once the sealed road runs out, Grammy's van holding its distance behind us in the dust. We passed the oddly named settlement of Come By Chance, and pulled in at Pilliga, the town, for a coffee taken standing beside the bus. There was a clock running under the whole morning. Sal had a video call for her placement, its start time fixed, and that deadline set the outer edge of the day's driving. So we did the sum that had become second nature, kilometres against the hour, and kept moving with one eye on the time.
Then the forest took us in. The Pilliga is a vast thing, close to half a million hectares, one of the largest stretches of forest left in the state, and for the week ahead it would be the whole of our world. We had chosen the campground at the Salt Caves for our corner of it. When we rolled in there were four sites and no one else about, so once again the choosing was ours. Grammy brought her van in near ours, and we levelled up with only minutes in hand, the kettle on while Sal found her signal and her seat. The deadline we had chased all morning arrived, and she met it with time to spare.
While she talked, the forest waited on us. Above the caves stood a fire tower, and once the call was done we walked across to see what the place was about. The Salt Caves, so the story runs, were once thirty metres deep, salt hanging from the roof in columns like stalactites. Whether any of it had ever been true, no one seemed able to say, and standing over what time had left of them we found it hard enough to believe ourselves. Some stories outlast the thing that made them. This felt like one of those.
The tower gave us the better reward. We climbed it and the country opened on every side, flat and running clear to the edge of sight, broken only by two shapes we already knew. The Warrumbungles held the southern horizon, and away to the east rose Mount Kaputar. We had camped high on Kaputar more than two years back, and spent our nights among the Warrumbungles in those same first weeks of this life, on the long road that eventually carried us down to Tasmania, when everything about the bus and the life in it was still new and unproven. To find them again from a fire tower in the middle of the Pilliga, plain and familiar as the houses of old neighbours, was to feel how far we had come, and how much of that distance had quietly curved back to meet itself.
The week found its own rhythm after that. The Pomoly Dweller earned its keep again, lit every evening, the cooking done over its heat while the light went out of the trees and the smell of woodsmoke worked its way into everything we owned. One night Sal made her first camp oven damper in the Snow Peak, turned out of the coals better than either of us had any right to expect, split and eaten warm with the fire still going. The weather could not decide what it wanted. We had days of rain, the sort that draws the forest in close and lays a steady hiss across the roof, and then days of hard clean blue that made the wet hours seem like something we had dreamed. On one of the fine ones we took a short ride out to a small lake nearby, no reason to it beyond the wanting to move, to set a different piece of the same quiet in front of us for an hour.
Eventually the week ran itself out, the way they do once you stop counting the days of them. We packed down, Grammy's van swinging in behind us as it had all the way south, and pointed the bus towards Dubbo. Behind us the Pilliga closed over in the mirrors, another long stretch of road laid down and let go of, and the two mountains we had known when we were new to all this still sitting out there somewhere, holding up their patch of sky.Read more
A Week Where Nobody Was
Jun 18–25 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 22 °C
We turned south out of Hebel with the border country opening flat and wide ahead, and made one small concession to tourism before the day was done. Lightning Ridge sat just off our line, a town famous around the world for its black opal, and it felt wrong to pass so close without at least laying eyes on the place. So we turned off, drove in, and rolled slowly through the streets, Grammy's van holding station behind us in the mirrors. We did not stop. A look was enough. Touristy things had never really been our thing, and there was something almost satisfying in the honesty of it: we drove through, said we had done it, turned around and headed back out the way we had come.
The drive itself settled into a rhythm of two animals. Emus stalked the paddocks in twos and threes, all neck and indignation, and wild goats grazed the road edges in scruffy mobs, lifting their heads as the convoy rumbled past. If the country out here belonged to anything, it belonged to them.
Google Maps, meanwhile, was having one of its days. We were tracking toward a campsite just north of Walgett when we realised the town itself was nearly upon us. For reasons known only to itself, the app wanted us to drive an extra seven kilometres in, negotiate a roundabout, perform a U-turn and come all the way back out again. We declined. A U-turn of our own on the empty highway solved the problem in about ten seconds, and we doubled back to the turn-off we had almost sailed past.
The track in wound through river red gums, and we watched it carefully as we went. Rain was forecast sometime in the coming week, and this was black soil country again, the kind that turns to glue under a wheel and holds a bus fast until it decides to let go. We wanted to know, before we committed, that whatever fell we could still get out. The spot itself we had picked from photos on WikiCamps, and for once the photos had undersold it.
Compared with every other camp on this leg, the place was deserted, probably because of that slightly harder track in. No grey nomads, no ring of caravans, no generators muttering into the evening. Just us, the trees and the river, our two vehicles settled in among the gums on the banks of the Barwon, the water sliding past brown and unhurried on its long journey toward the Darling.
We were closer to the highway than we would have liked. Trucks rumbled over the bridge within sight of camp, a low thunder that rolled through the trees at intervals all day. But by about eight each night they thinned to nothing, and the dark that followed belonged entirely to the river: the slap of water against a snag, something small moving through the leaf litter, the cold pressing in at the edges of the fire. During the days Anth collected firewood, dragging back fallen limbs with bark that left its dust on his sleeves, and we cooked on the Pomoly almost every day, the smell of woodsmoke settling into our clothes and hair until it simply became the smell of us. Dinner tasted faintly of the fire it was cooked on, which is to say it tasted right. A few people came and camped around the bend during the week, but nobody where we were. We had no visitors at all, and did not miss them.
Being a remnant pocket of forest, the birdlife was prolific. Not the great shrieking flocks of cockatoos we had grown used to further north, but small birds everywhere: flickers and chatter in the understorey, quick shapes working the bark of the red gums, a dawn chorus that arrived each morning before the light did. It was a different register of birdsong, closer and busier, the sound of a place still doing what it had always done.
The rain came, as promised. It fell, moved on, and the track dried out behind it, and with that the last small worry of the stay dissolved. When we eventually had to leave, we knew we would make it out easily.
One day we got the bikes down for a small explore, nothing huge, just a couple of kilometres looping through the remnant forest. There were campsites everywhere, good ones, tucked among the trees along the river, and in all of them only one other person. A whole quiet world, barely used.
After a week we decided to head off. We were on a schedule again, the calendar tugging at us the way it does, making sure Sal got to Melbourne in time for her workshop. So out we went along the dried track and into Walgett: a quick resupply at the expensive IGA, a pickup and post at the post office, a refuel, and then the highway south again. Behind us the Barwon went on sliding past the empty campsites, brown and unhurried, keeping a schedule no workshop could touch. We had somewhere to be. The river, as ever, did not. the Barwon and its red gums sliding away behind us.Read more
A Baby, a Breakdown, and Fifty Years
Jun 17–18 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 22 °C
Before we said our goodbye to the Balonne River, we sat down once more and reconsidered where we were headed next. The decision was to veer a little further west, out towards the small town of Hebel, and it was there, behind the pub, that we eventually pulled up. Hebel turned out to be barely a town at all, more an intersection with ambitions, a single crossroads with a pub standing on one side of the road and a general store facing it from the other, and not a great deal else to declare itself. The sort of place you would pass through in a blink if you were not minded to stop. We were minded to stop.
We wandered across the road to the general store and ordered ourselves lunch, a pie and a coffee each. The pies had a reputation that travelled further than the town did. The reviews we had read all sang the same tune, that these were pies full of great honest chunks of steak, real meat you could set your teeth into, a world away from the thin grey apology that passes for a pie at so many roadhouse counters. The reviews, for once, told the truth. The coffee, it must be said, did not live up to its neighbour on the plate, and left a good deal to be desired, but a fine pie covers a multitude of sins and we ate well and were content.
After that we drifted back, we to the bus and Grammy to her van, and let the afternoon take its own slow course. As the hours wore on, more caravans rolled in off the highway, and the modest patch of ground behind the pub filled and tightened around us, rig by rig, until the quiet little stop had become quite the gathering. Having already treated ourselves at midday, we reasoned there was nothing for it but to see the indulgence through, and we resolved on dinner at the pub as well. First, though, a drink. We stepped into the bar for a quick one, Grammy with a rum in her hand and Sal and Anth each with a Diet Coke, and it was there, in the worn and friendly dim of the old outback hotel, that Grammy told us her story.
She had been to the Hebel Hotel once before, she said, a great many years ago now, back when Anth was no more than a baby in arms. Their car had broken down somewhere out in this unforgiving country, and stranded with a small child and nowhere else to turn, they had been given the floor of a room here to sleep on for the night. It is a strange and tender thing, to stand in a place as a grown man and hear that you had passed a night here before you could even walk, carried in by parents long since young. The walls of the old pub had held that night and given it back to us now, and for a moment the decades folded together, the baby on the floor and the man at the bar one and the same, his mother beside him still, the two of them out on the road together once more.
We wandered back across to the general store for our dinner and ordered a parmy apiece, that most quintessential of Australian pub meals, crumbed and cheese-topped and entirely unnecessary after the pie, which was precisely the point. For Sal it was a small first, her first real outback pub, the genuine article, and there was a pleasure in watching her take it in. And as we left the store and started back across the road to the bus, the outback obliged us with its finest trick: the whole western sky caught alight and burned a deep and silent red, the kind of sunset that needs no mountains or sea to make it, just the flat unbroken land and all that sky above it. It was only the one night we spent at Hebel, and the most that was asked of us in it was to sit and watch the road trains thunder through on their way to somewhere else. But it was an experience, and out here, that is enough. That is plenty.Read more
Black Soil and the Balonne
Jun 13–17 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 23 °C
We pushed on west, through Westmar and on towards St George, the country opening out around us into the wide flat floodplains of the Balonne. The plan, such as it was, had been to camp just south of the town. But out here the ground itself sets the terms. This is black soil country, and black soil is a thing you learn to respect: dry, it is firm enough to build a road on, but let any real rain touch it and it turns to a deep, gluey, bottomless paste that grips a wheel and will not let go. For a bus as heavy as ours, getting bogged in it was no small worry, the sort of mistake that ends with a tractor and a long wait and a lighter wallet. So we drove towards our chosen camp not entirely sure we would be able to use it.
The closer we came to St George the more our doubt looked justified. There was water lying about everywhere, in the table drains and across the low ground, the land still holding the memory of recent rain. So we did the sensible thing. We pulled over on the side of the road in town and sat a while and talked it through. The new plan came together quickly enough: refuel here, then carry on south down through the small town of Dirranbandi, where there was another camp we knew of. It was black soil too, that we could not escape out here, but it had one redeeming feature, a roadside rest area close by that would serve as a backstop if the ground proved too soft to trust. A bolthole, in other words. Something to fall back on.
Plan settled, we swung south out of St George and ran down towards Dirranbandi. Just shy of the town we stopped at a roadside rest and had a bite to eat before pressing on, not knowing, as we sat there, that the camp itself lay less than twenty minutes further along. We could have held out and eaten there in comfort had we only checked the map a little more closely, but that is the small comedy of the road, and we laughed about it afterwards. We rolled on through the quiet streets of the little town and pulled in at the Balonne Minor campsite, right on the banks of the Balonne River.
The water was here too, and the warning of the black soil written plainly across the ground. There were stretches within the camp that were pure soft mud, places that would have taken hold of the bus and stuck us fast in a heartbeat had we been foolish enough to try them. But we had the whole place to ourselves, not another soul in sight, and that freedom let us pick and choose. We found a patch of hard-packed dry ground that would bear our weight, eased the bus onto it, and made ourselves at home on the riverbank.
And then the days did what the good days always do out here. They unfolded, one into the next, into the gentle shape our life had taken. Sal at her study. The training under whatever tree would hold the rings. The cooking, the slow afternoons, the evenings drawn in close around the fire while the river ran dark and quiet beyond it. As the camp dried out over those days, others found their way in, a van here, a caravan there, staying a night or two and moving along, the way travellers do when a place is a waypoint rather than a destination. For them it was a stop. For us it was something else, and sitting there watching them come and go, we felt the difference of it keenly. This was not a holiday. We were not ticking off attractions or racing the daylight from one marked wonder to the next. We had long since let that way of moving fall away. What we did instead was find the quiet places, the overlooked corners, the hard-packed patch beside the river that nobody else wanted, and simply live there for as long as it suited us. Home was not a town or a postcode or a place on any list. Home was wherever we pulled up.Read more
Splitting the Distance West
Jun 12–13 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 23 °C
There was a time, and not so long ago, when our wanderings were decided the evening before we broke camp, the next day's road chosen over the fire or not chosen at all, left to the morning and whatever mood the morning brought. That was the old freedom, the one that asked nothing of the clock. But freedom, we were learning, bends itself around the things that matter, and these days Sal's work and her study and the fixed hours of her online university classes meant we travelled a little more to a timetable than we once had. The next proper leg, out west towards St George, was a long one, longer than a single comfortable day's drive, and rather than push the whole of it at once we settled on a sensible compromise: stop halfway, and split the distance in two.
With the plan made, we found we had time in hand, enough to double back the fifteen minutes into Dalby and stock up properly at the Aldi there. It was a small piece of foresight that would pay off down the track. The run ahead, on through to outback New South Wales, would offer little but the small IGAs of far-flung towns, good shops every one but dear in the way that remoteness makes things dear, so we took the chance while we had it and filled the bus with what we would need.
From Dalby the road ran out flat and straight and due west, the kind of road that gives the country room to show how much of itself there is. Sal made good use of it. She sat at her desk in the cab, the office Anth had built her come into its own now that we were moving, and worked at her study as the paddocks slid by, and at one point allowed herself the small pleasure of a video call to Mack, his face on the laptop screen and the open road rolling along behind the conversation. Ninety minutes or so of this and we arrived at our halfway haven, an off-road quarry site just outside the little town of Westmar.
It did not sound like much, a quarry, and said aloud it conjured nothing you would choose to sleep beside. But the reality of the place undid the word entirely. It sat far enough back from the highway that the road noise never reached us, and the workings themselves were old enough, long enough rested, that the harshness had gone out of them and the bush had begun its patient work of softening every edge. For what we wanted of it, a single quiet night, it was just right. There was dry timber scattered all about, the gift of country like this, and we dragged armfuls of it up and built ourselves an open fire. Grammy settled in on one side of it and we on the other, the three of us ranged around the flames watching the faithful bush telly, that oldest and best of channels, the burning log that never shows the same picture twice.
Then the night came down, and the outback gave us the thing only the outback can. The sky out here is not the sky of towns. With no glow on any horizon to dull it, it deepened and deepened until it was thick with stars, more than seemed possible, the whole vault of them wheeling quietly overhead. We slumped back in our chairs and gave ourselves over to it, hunting satellites the way we liked to do, picking out those steady moving points of light that slide so patiently between the fixed ones. There is an old pleasure in that game, and a newer poignancy to it too, for not so long ago a satellite far above had been the one thin thread carrying Anth's words home from the New Zealand backcountry. Tonight the sky asked nothing of us but to look. And look we did, and were rewarded: the International Space Station itself came over, bright and certain, tracking the dark from one edge to the other while we watched it the whole way across before, at last, we turned in for the night.Read more
White Storm Over the Water
Jun 7–12 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 21 °C
We woke to the stillness of the camp, that early country quiet that sits over a small town before it has properly stirred, and set off on a short walk through Maidenwell to stretch the night out of our legs. Like so many of these inland towns it was a modest place, a handful of streets given over to the wide quiet of the bush around them, and it did not take long to see the whole of it. We came back to the bus, packed our small home down, and said our goodbye to the first stop of the leg. One night, and already the road had us again.
The drive was a short one. We rolled into Dalby, a town threaded through Anth's earliest memories, the waypoint of his childhood on all those long runs out west to family properties, familiar to him in that deep and half-remembered way a place is when you knew it as a boy. This time we stopped, long enough for a coffee, before pointing the bus out of town again. Twenty minutes was all it took to reach the next camp, on the shores of Lake Broadwater, the one true natural lake of any size on the whole of the Darling Downs and a known haven for waterbirds. We found ourselves a spot up the far end and settled in among the red gums.
There were corellas. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, a white storm of birds strung through every tree and wheeling over the water, and they were loud beyond all reckoning. Their racket filled the days from first light, a relentless, comic, ear-splitting chorus that rose and fell and never quite stopped, to the point where Sal could barely hear herself think, let alone hold a video call. And calls were exactly what she needed to make, for she was settling into the new office Anth had built for her in the cab of the bus. This was the cleverness of his long list of small jobs come good. Sal's counselling work asks for privacy, the kind of quiet, closed space a client on the other end of a line has every right to expect, and Anth had made her one out of the front of the bus, fitting a Lagun swing-out table so that she could take her sessions in private at camp. He had thought ahead, too, to the days when we would be moving: the table swung out for study on the road as readily as it served at a standstill, so that neither the driving nor the destination need interrupt the steady progress of her degree. The corellas, of course, had not been consulted, and on the worst of their mornings Sal could only laugh and wait for a lull.
We took the bikes down off the back for their first proper outing of this new chapter. It was nothing arduous, a gentle ten kilometres looping through an old pine forest, the trunks standing in their long planted rows and the soft needle-fall hushing the ground beneath the tyres. Ten kilometres, though, was ten kilometres, and Sal was quietly pleased with herself for it, the sort of small physical victory that this life serves up when you least expect it. In the afternoons the Pomoly came out, the faithful hot-tent stove that had warmed us through cold Tasmanian nights, pressed now into gentler service for cooking, and we ate the early evenings away beside its glow while the corellas finally, mercifully, began to settle.
The riding was not the only thing keeping us moving. Over the still months at Grammy's, Anth had been quietly working out a training program built around the little equipment the bus could carry, and this was the place we began it again in earnest. Rings hung from the sturdy lower bows of the eucalypts, swaying slightly in the morning air, and from them we worked through push-ups and pull-ups and rows, our resistance bands stretched to the very limit of what they had in them. It was a far cry from the ordered machines and clean mirrors of a gym, this business of hauling ourselves up beneath a gum tree with the corellas jeering overhead, but it did the job. It kept us active, kept the blood moving and the body honest, and there was a satisfaction in it that no gym had ever quite managed, the satisfaction of making do, of building strength out of rope and rubber and whatever the bush gave us to hang it from.
The other quiet luxury of the place was its showers. After so long making do, there is a real and uncomplicated joy in a hot shower at a campsite, and on the morning before we left we indulged in one, washing the dust of the road away and stepping out clean into the day. The last couple of nights brought a little light rain, soft on the roof, the first the new leg had given us. Lake Broadwater had been everything we could have asked of a second stop, generous and easy and alive with birds, and as we packed to move on we agreed between us that the next chapter of the trip had begun about as well as a chapter could.Read more
A Convoy of Two Homes
Jun 6–7 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C
The day came, and we headed out once more onto the open road. Six months had passed at Grammy's, and though every week of them had been a gift, the long unhurried stretch of family that this life so often keeps us from, the time with the kids, the time with our parents, the slow ordinary days of being near the people we love, we had felt for a while now the old pull returning. We were long overdue. The bus had sat too many nights in one driveway, and a home built for movement begins to fret when it is kept still.
Grammy was ready too. Her van was fitted out and packed, her own small home squared away for the road, the three weeks she had spent travelling with us in Tasmania having quietly relit something in her that had never fully gone out. We were as ready as she was. There were goodbyes to be made first, the ones this family has learned to make so often and never learned to make easily. We farewelled Torrin, Soph and Mack, each of them setting out on adventures of their own, each road bending away from ours in its own direction. We had stood in this exact feeling many times, the strange double pull of being glad to go and sorry to part, and we had long since stopped expecting it to soften.
Then we turned the key and went. It was not a long drive, and the bus purred along beneath us, settling back into the work it was made for as though it had been waiting all those still months to be asked. Grammy followed behind in her van, the two homes moving in convoy through the soft green South Burnett country, hills folding gently away on either side. Our first destination lay only a couple of hours off, the small town of Maidenwell, a quiet village set in the hills at the gateway to the Bunya Mountains. There was a particular rightness to that, though we hardly spoke of it: the Bunyas had been our very first stop at the beginning of all this, near two and a half years ago, and here we were again at their foot, the long circle of the journey turning over once more beneath our wheels.
The camp was nothing more than a peaceful oval in the middle of town, a few vans and caravans scattered loosely across the grass, the kind of modest free stop that asks nothing of you but to settle and be quiet. We settled. And the sleep that came was extraordinary, deep and unbroken and complete, the sleep of a body that has finally been returned to the thing it knows. It was good, simply, to be sleeping somewhere other than a driveway again, to wake in a place we had driven to rather than one we had been waiting in. There was a small irony in it that did not escape Anth, who had only weeks before spent six weeks sleeping in the backcountry of New Zealand, in huts and on hard ground far past the reach of any town. He had slept rough in some of the wildest country either of us had ever seen, and yet it was this, a flat town oval in a forgettable little village, with Grammy's van a few steps away and Sal breathing softly beside him, that felt, that first night, like the truest rest of all. Home, it turned out, had never been the wildness or the comfort. It was the moving, and the each other, and the simple fact of being underway again.Read more
Beads on a String
Apr 22–Jun 6 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C
Anth and Torrin drove the bus down the driveway at Grammy's and brought it to rest where the trail could no longer follow. There is a strange arithmetic to coming off a long walk: the legs keep reckoning in kilometres the body no longer has to give, the shoulders still carry the ghost of a pack, and the mind, set for weeks to the simple grammar of one foot and then the other, finds the suburban stillness almost too soft to stand in. For the two of them it was a quiet adjustment, made quieter by the thing that sat beneath it. They had not walked the whole length of the South Island as they had set out to. Weather and the closing season had taken the last of it from them, and that final unwalked stretch stayed out there in their minds, a line on a map left open. They might have let it ache. Instead they did what this life had taught them to do with the things that do not finish on schedule: they folded it up and put it away, not as a failure but as an invitation, a reason to come back, an adventure held in reserve for a season not yet arrived.
Two days later Sal was home, and the family closed back around its own centre. This time the drive to fetch her fell to Anth, out to the train station at Gympie to wait on the platform he had waited on before, watching for the figure that turned an ordinary arrival into the end of the longest goodbye they had ever set themselves. With everyone gathered once more under the one stretch of sky, the talk turned, as it always did, to the road, and to when the wheels might begin to turn again. A shape emerged, tentative as all their plans were tentative, plans being suggestions the road might or might not honour: they would leave just after Pop's birthday on the fifth of June.
Until then the days had no shortage of work to fill them. Sal was back inside the books, though her study break had come and gone while Anth was away in New Zealand, so the two of them never got to share it; the rest she had earned had been a solitary one, spent against the backdrop of those sparse satellite messages. Anth turned to the bus and to a list that had been growing in the back of his mind for months. Nothing on it was large. It was the slow accumulation of small things, a fitting here, an adjustment there, the hundred minor attentions a home on wheels asks of the hands that keep it, and he worked through them steadily in the mild autumn light, the days warm enough still at twenty-four degrees to make the labour pleasant.
The weeks carried a run of birthdays, one after another like beads on a string. Anth's came first. Then Shea's, who was back among them by then from his stint down in Sydney. And finally Pop's, the one the departure plan was built around. Torrin did what Torrin always does and made the cakes, the ones the whole family looks forward to year on year, and this year was no exception; there is a particular kind of homecoming in a familiar cake, in the proof that some traditions travel with you no matter how scattered the household becomes. Sophie and Shea had set up in Soph's van, tucked into a corner of the property, the vehicle still carrying a few mechanical complaints that wanted sorting before it would be trusted with real distance. Their intention was to leave when we left, though the road would take them sideways from us almost at once, their path and ours not due to braid together again for a couple of months. Torrin, for his part, was already looking past all of it, toward the end of the year and a trip with Shea to Canada for the ski season, busy with the long tail of arrangements such a journey drags behind it and looking into trials to help cover the cost. Mack would stay on in Gympie. And so, as it had so many times before, the family was quietly preparing to scatter to its separate roads. We had done this often enough to know its shape, and knowing the shape did not lighten it. The going of people you love in different directions is a weight you simply learn to carry without complaint.
Pop's birthday arrived and passed gently. All of us gathered at the home to mark it, carrying in cake and small treats, sitting with him through one of those afternoons whose worth lies entirely in its plainness, in being there, in the cake on the plate and the people in the room. And then, almost before it seemed possible, it was the eve of departure. Tomorrow the bus would point itself outward again and the chosen life would pick up its old rhythm, the engine and the open gate and the country unrolling ahead. That last still night held the two feelings it always held, side by side and inseparable: the excitement of the road remembered, and the nervousness of leaving the known behind. We had felt them both many times. We had learned, by now, that they always came together, and that the coming of them meant it was nearly time to go.Read more
The Longest Goodbye
Mar 10–Apr 22 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C
Sal drove away from the airport with the cabin of the bus suddenly too quiet around her. She had handed Anth over to the sliding doors a hundred times before, but this was the longest goodbye they had set themselves, six weeks marked out against the shape of her trimester, and the distance felt different for being chosen. There was no resentment in it. Some things you do not stand in the way of, and walking a New Zealand trail beside Torrin was one of them; a stretch of days that might never come round again, father and son on the same track, the sort of thing you carry for the rest of your life. So she pointed herself south to her parents' place and let the missing of him sit beside her, neither fought nor fed, the way the road had taught them both to travel.
University came back at a sprint. Two units, both dense and theoretical, neuroscience and grief therapy, and both close to Sal's heart for the nursing years behind her. They asked a great deal: extra lectures, weekly readings, new concepts that did not settle on the first pass or the second. The assignments were as vast as ever, and she gave each one the long, careful hours it wanted, researching and drafting and polishing until it held. A High Distinction and a Distinction came back for the effort. At the same time her work doubled when a colleague resigned, and the timing could hardly have been worse, falling across the new trimester and a two-day workshop down in Melbourne.
The stress of it was real, with Anth away and uni, work and family all pulling at once. Sal kept herself afloat by the small reliable things: five kilometres on foot each day, strength sessions at the gym nearby, and the steady company of her mum and dad, their conversation rich enough to be its own kind of rest. There was relief, too, in finally closing what she had come to call her tooth-troubled era, the last of eleven appointments over nearly a year for one stubborn tooth, six thousand dollars and twelve months put behind her at last.
The missing was sharpest in the silences. For long stretches there was no proper contact at all, only sporadic satellite messages pinging in as Anth and Torrin pushed through the remote heart of the South Island, the Te Araroa carrying them far past phone signal and into country that answered to no timetable. A few clipped words on a screen, hours or days apart, were all she had of him some weeks. She learned to read a great deal into very little: that he was well, that the weather held or did not, that the next hut was reached. It was enough, and it was not enough, both at once.
Through all of it loomed the placement she had to organise, and the silence she met when she tried. The university did not reply. The agencies she emailed did not reply. Then a thought arrived almost on its own: her old school in Canberra, the one that already knew her, might be glad to have her back. A few calls and emails later it was settled, the face-to-face counselling hours secured to sit alongside the online group work she was already doing through SMART Recovery Australia. One more knot loosened.
The weeks with Grannie and Grandad steadied her in ways the to-do list never could. Mornings often began with a walk alongside Grannie around the broadwalk, the two of them peeling off to Flinders Lane for coffee as a matter of ritual. They drank a good many coffees at that cafe over the season, with Sophie when she came to visit, with Shea when he came, with Andrew when he drove up for the Easter weekend. Sophie stayed about a week, working through crucial assignments of her own for her counselling diploma; for a stretch, mother and daughter studied side by side. With her brother Andrew, Sal walked up Mount Coolum a second time, the challenge of it entirely tangible, her heart going hard against her ribs with every step of the climb to the top.
Easter was lovely. Sal's sister Al and her brother-in-law Paul joined them, and Andrew, for Sunday lunch. There was a Brisbane workshop tucked into the calendar as well, where Sal stayed with Andrew and Tania for the last time. They had hosted her through two years of Brisbane workshops with a warmth that never thinned, and Tania's cooking had been a thing of quiet artistry, every meal considered and set down with care.
Then word came that Anth was coming home early, the trail's last days closed off ahead of schedule by snow and weather. After six weeks of screens and satellites, the thought of him in front of her again felt almost unreal. Sal had built her days around seeing Grandad give a talk at the Anzac Day service, and the homecoming threaded itself awkwardly through those plans, the way real life rarely arrives on cue. Anth and Torrin came through customs at a crawl, slow enough that the neat version of the reunion fell away; in the end they could get only as far as Nambour by train. So Sal drove the bus out to meet them there, and when she finally saw the pair of them step down onto the platform, road-worn and grinning, all the clipped little messages of the past six weeks resolved at once into something solid she could put her arms around. They drove back to Maroochydore to gather the loose threads of plans and belongings, and from there Anth and Torrin took the wheel home to Gympie while Sal stayed on a couple of days more for Grandad's service. The longest goodbye they had ever set themselves had ended the way all the others had, with someone walking back through a door, the bus full and humming once more, and the quiet of those first solo kilometres already fading into memory.Read more
Six Weeks and the Open Gate
Mar 6–10 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C
The store rang the morning after Anth pulled back into Grammy's place at Gympie: the phone had finally come in. There was a rhythm to these things, the way a part or a parcel always seemed to land the moment you stopped waiting for it. He sorted it out with a few calls. Grannie would collect the phone, and Anth would gather it from her on the same run that brought Sal home, folding two errands into one trip to the airport.
Two days until Sal landed. A handful more until he left for New Zealand. In that narrow gap there were jobs on the bus that wanted finishing, and one in particular had been waiting longer than the rest: the electromagnetic drawer locks. He had planned them for months, sketched them, set them aside, returned to them. Saturday was marked for the work, and Saturday delivered. The iron infusion had left him with a surge of energy he had not felt in a while, and he spent the whole day at it, wiring and fitting until the drawers finally held themselves shut the way he had imagined. A small thing, perhaps, but the kind of small thing that makes a rolling home feel finished.
The loose shape of what came next sat warm in the planning. When Anth returned from the trail, we would point the bus at the horizon again, only this time we would not travel alone. Sophie would fall in beside us in her new van, and Grammy too. Three weeks with us in Tasmania had stirred something in her that had not settled since; the nomad in her, it seemed, had only been resting. There was a particular pleasure in imagining the convoy of us, each in our own home on wheels, choosing the same road.
Soon enough Anth was driving the familiar stretch to the airport, waiting at the gate for Sal to walk back into our days. Melbourne airport had handed her back to him so many times over these two years that the ritual had worn a groove; this reunion was no different in its relief, and no less sweet for being practised.
The last two days went to the pack. Anth laid it out and took it apart and laid it out again, weighing every item against the weeks of walking ahead, the way you do when the country is unfamiliar and the load is yours alone to carry. Our time together was short and we both felt the shortness of it. But Torrin was out there on the track, and the chance for Anth to walk beside our son through that country was not one he was willing to let pass.
Then the final drive to the airport. We had made the run to those sliding doors more times than we could count, learned the ache of the departure lounge and the gladness of the arrivals hall. This parting set a record we had never wanted: six weeks, dialled in now around Sal's university dates, longer than any stretch before it. Sal watched Anth go through to the gate and the gap opened ahead of them both, and he went towards it anyway, because the life they had chosen asked it of him, and because every separation either of them had ever counted had ended, in time, with one of them walking back through a sliding door.Read more
Where the Bus Was Born
Mar 4–6 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C
While Sophie was away visiting Shea in Sydney, we'd been making good use of her new van. But with the vehicle waiting for the mechanic for some fine tuning, we decided to take the bus down for our next trip instead. Even though it meant another departing moment in what had become an exhausting season of goodbyes, there was genuine joy in travelling together again. The bus hummed beneath us with familiar reassurance, our golden home carrying us through landscapes we'd missed from behind its panoramic windows. We both lamented how long this chapter of separations had stretched, each reunion seeming to carry within it the seeds of the next farewell. We ached for the season to turn, for the moment when we could simply be together without a countdown ticking somewhere in the background.
But that moment hadn't arrived yet. The bus pulled into the Sunshine Coast Airport, and Sal gathered her things for the flight to Melbourne. University workshops awaited. Another platform, another departure, another figure growing smaller through glass. The familiarity of it didn't soften the sting.
Anth watched her disappear into the terminal, then continued south down the coast. The bus needed a few things, and practical tasks provided welcome structure for the hours that followed. But a more pressing matter occupied his thoughts. Twelve months of clinical trials had extracted their toll on his body, and his iron levels had dropped to concerning depths. Under normal circumstances, he might have let time and diet do their work. But with a two-month hike alongside Torrin looming on the horizon, the South Island of New Zealand demanding everything his body could give, a quick fix was needed. An iron infusion appointment had been booked for the following day.
Grannie and Grandad's welcomed him for an overnight stay, their home performing its familiar role as waypoint between obligations. One more night under a solid roof before the next chapter of logistics unfolded.
The following morning, Anth navigated the bus toward his appointment, searching for somewhere to park a vehicle that didn't fit neatly into standard bays. Street after street offered nothing suitable until, by a coincidence that felt almost scripted, the only available space revealed itself directly outside our old house on the lake at Wurtulla. The very same spot where Anth had spent countless days building the bus when we'd first bought it, back when this entire adventure existed only as blueprint and ambition. The bus now sat polished and proven in the exact location where it had been born, a full circle moment that demanded quiet acknowledgement before he walked to his appointment.
The infusion went smoothly, iron flowing into veins that had been depleted by months of blood draws and clinical protocols. With it came the hope of renewed energy, the kind of deep cellular restoration that would prove essential when mountain passes and river crossings replaced waiting rooms and observation wards.
A quick phone call to check on his device. Still on its way from repair. Hopefully tomorrow, they said. Anth weighed his options. A phone was crucial for the upcoming hike. Navigation, communication, safety. It couldn't be left to chance. He decided to wait one more day, pulling the bus into a park not far from Grannie and Grandad's. A quick check confirmed he could stay another night, and the rest of the day filled itself with the endless list of small tasks that preceded any major departure. Adjustments, preparations, the quiet tinkering that transformed anxiety into productivity.
Friday morning brought farewells and genuine thanks to Grannie and Grandad, whose home had served as staging ground for so many of our comings and goings. The girl at the repair shop had said around three o'clock, so Anth used the intervening hours wisely. Hiking supplies were purchased, those final items that separated a well-prepared tramper from a hopeful one. A couple of remaining bits for the bus found their way into bags. The list shortened with each errand completed.
At three o'clock, Anth arrived at the shop with expectation. The phone wasn't there. It's at the depot, the girl explained, her expression carrying the particular discomfort of delivering news she couldn't control. There was no point or reason to direct frustration at her. The situation sat beyond her means to influence, just as it sat beyond Anths. These small moments of forced acceptance had become familiar teachers on this journey, reminders that flexibility mattered more than frustration, that plans existed only as suggestions the universe might or might not honour.
With a tentative plan to collect the phone on Monday, the last possible opportunity before his flight, Anth pointed the bus back toward Gympie. The road north unwound through late afternoon light, another day of preparation behind him, the trail in New Zealand drawing closer with each sunset. The season of departures continued its relentless rhythm, but somewhere ahead, beyond airports and infusions and delayed phone repairs, father and son would meet on a trail at the bottom of the world. That thought alone made every logistical frustration feel remarkably small.Read more
The Long Wait: 49 Days of Becoming
Jan 14–Mar 4 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C
The weeks that followed stretched like Queensland summers do: slow, sticky, and seemingly without end. With Anth confined to Melbourne's clinical facility and Sophie's temporary accommodation coming to its conclusion, the first order of business was consolidation. Mack helped move Sophie's belongings out, the logistics of dismantling one living arrangement to create another requiring the particular patience that only siblings can offer each other.
Sophie moved into the bus with Sal, and suddenly our rolling home held two women, one dog, and the accumulated possessions of someone in the process of reimagining her entire life. The sorting began immediately. Every item interrogated: keep, store, or release. The measuring stick was ruthless — would it fit in a van? Sophie was building toward her own nomadic chapter, and the curation of belongings became its own form of meditation. What truly mattered? What had been carried out of habit rather than necessity? Storage units absorbed the undecided, those objects too weighted with sentiment to discard but too bulky to carry forward.
The Queensland heat showed no mercy throughout. The humidity wrapped around everything like a second skin, relentless and inescapable. Mornings that promised freshness surrendered to oppressive afternoons within hours. Even simple tasks — moving boxes, organising storage, walking Chia — became endurance exercises against the climate. We'd lived in Queensland for years, yet the heat felt newly hostile after months of southern travel.
Sal found her rhythm despite the conditions. She joined a local gym, and the discipline of consistent training three days a week provided structure to weeks that might otherwise have dissolved into shapeless waiting. Iron didn't care about humidity. Barbells demanded presence regardless of who was missing. Between sessions, CPD courses kept her professional development moving forward, and client work continued, the online coaching that followed wifi signals wherever we happened to park. The days filled themselves, though the space where Anth should have been remained conspicuously empty.
She missed him. Not in the dramatic way of novels, but in the quiet accumulation of moments unshared. A sunset that deserved commentary. A meal that would have tasted better across from his familiar face. The particular loneliness of sleeping in a bus designed for two when only one remained.
Yet brightness punctuated the waiting. A day trip to Widgie Hip Camp for Sav's birthday brought reunion with the Rookie Adventurers, that community of like-minded souls whose paths intersected with ours along the travelling circuit. Sophie disappeared for four days to Double Island with Sal's sister, leaving Sal on Chia duty. The dog proved an undemanding companion, her simple needs and boundless enthusiasm a remedy for quieter days.
One afternoon stands luminous in memory. Mack and Lachie visited, and someone produced a deck of Uno cards. What followed was less card game and more theatrical performance. Lachie was particularly relaxed that day, and a surprising talent for the creative arts emerged from behind his usual demeanour. Every card played became an event. Grand gestures accompanied each draw. His vocal prosody shifted between dramatic whisper and flamboyant declaration, each Uno call delivered with the flair of a Shakespearean actor discovering comedy for the first time. We were in stitches, the kind of laughter that leaves stomach muscles aching and eyes streaming. It was a really fun afternoon, the sort that imprints itself precisely because it arrived unplanned and unexpected.
The weeks continued their slow procession. Mother and daughter found their rhythm on the bus, that particular intimacy of shared small spaces creating conversations that larger houses might never have prompted. Then, quietly and with the satisfaction of months of searching, Sophie found her van. The purchase marked a turning point, her own nomadic vessel secured, the dream of vanlife and overseas adventures suddenly tangible rather than theoretical.
A trip to Grannie and Grandad's brought family connection and the celebration of Grannie's birthday, another gathering that reminded us how these milestones gained significance through our travelling life. Chia went to stay with Sav, and Sophie headed to the airport for her own screening appointment, the clinical trial pathway that had funded our adventures now extending to the next generation.
And then, after just over thirty days of separation, Anth came home. The trial complete, his body released from medical obligation, the distance that had stretched between us finally collapsing into reunion. Grammy's driveway witnessed another homecoming, the bus feeling whole again with both of us in it.
But reunion, as we'd learned, often carried the seeds of the next departure. Plans took shape quickly. Sal booked flights to Melbourne for her latest university workshops, the professional commitments that kept her qualifications current. And Anth, his eyes bright with possibility, made a decision that had been quietly forming throughout those thirty days of clinical confinement. He would join Torrin on the trail in New Zealand. His son had just completed the North Island of Te Araroa and was preparing to tackle the South Island. A flight was booked. Potentially two months apart from Sal stretched ahead, longer than any separation we'd yet navigated.
The weight of it settled between us in the quiet moments. Two months. And yet Sal, despite knowing how deeply she would miss him, would never deny such an extraordinary father-son adventure. Some opportunities arrive once and never again. Torrin was out there walking the length of a country, and Anth had the chance to walk beside him through some of the most spectacular wilderness on earth. The strength of what we'd built together over these nomadic years meant trusting that distance couldn't diminish it. Love, we'd discovered, didn't require proximity. It required faith.Read more
Tolls, Tears, and Google Maps
Jan 11–14 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 26 °C
The airport had become a revolving door of goodbyes. First Anth, disappearing through the terminal for his pending trial in Melbourne, that familiar walk toward automatic doors and clinical confinement. Then, several days later, Shea. His departure carried a different flavour: not temporary medical obligation but a new chapter entirely, a season of living and working in Sydney that would stretch the distance between him and Sophie into something more permanent than a few weeks.
Two farewells in quick succession left Sophie and Sal lighter in number but not in spirit. They had each other, and they had an appointment in Brisbane that had been a long time coming.
Google Maps, however, had other ideas about how they'd get there. The route it charted read less like navigation and more like punishment. Three tolls on the way in, the kind of unwelcome surprises that pinged through the car like a financial countdown. The algorithm dragged them through side streets and back streets, past suburbs neither of them recognised, through intersections that felt improvised rather than planned. Sophie and Sal exchanged glances that oscillated between disbelief and laughter as each new turn revealed another questionable directional choice.
Somehow, against all reasonable expectation, they arrived on time. The appointment was kept, whatever anxiety the journey had generated dissolving into the relief of actually being where they needed to be. The return trip proved marginally kinder. A single toll this time, Google apparently having exhausted its appetite for financial extraction on the outbound leg.
They collected Chia from Grannie and Grandad's on the way back, the dog's unbridled enthusiasm at their arrival a tonic after a day of navigational chaos and farewell residue. With Chia loaded and bags packed, the three of them pointed north once more. Grammy's driveway waited, that familiar patch of concrete that had become our default base in Queensland. The bus would settle there again, and life would reorganise itself around this smaller, quieter configuration: mother, daughter, and one very happy dog, finding their rhythm while the men in their lives pursued their separate paths elsewhere.Read more
Summer Heat and Family Gatherings
Jan 5–11 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 24 °C
Grammy's driveway became our home once more, the bus settling into that familiar patch of concrete where so many of our journeys had begun and paused. Anth had screened for another trial, a bigger one this time, and the calendar showed less than a week before he'd disappear into Melbourne's clinical facility for just over thirty days. The countdown lent urgency to ordinary moments, transforming simple togetherness into something precious.
We made the most of every hour. The kids descended for summer barbecues, smoke rising from the grill while laughter filled Grammy's backyard. Sophie arrived with Shea, their partnership evident in the easy way they moved around each other. Mack and Lachie added their voices to the chorus, our son and his partner contributing to the particular chaos that adult children gathering always creates. Cold drinks sweated in the Queensland humidity as conversations wandered from memory to plan to comfortable nonsense.
These gatherings carried bittersweet undertones. Shea was preparing to leave for Sydney, trading familiar Queensland landscapes for the southern city's faster rhythms. Work and adventure called him there, and we recognised the restlessness that drove such decisions. Our own journey had begun with similar impulses, the need to see what lay beyond the known horizon. Sophie would miss him, that much was clear, though she supported the move with the understanding that comes from loving someone with their own ambitions.
Sophie herself had caught the wanderlust. Between barbecue servings and card games, she scrolled through van listings, her imagination populating each vehicle with possibilities. Vanlife and overseas travel danced through her planning, that familiar itch to move manifesting in saved searches and budget calculations. The apple, it seemed, hadn't fallen far from the travelling tree.
Torrin's voice reached us across the Tasman through video calls, his trail updates painting pictures of New Zealand's rugged beauty. He was making progress southward, each conversation revealing new challenges overcome and landscapes conquered. These digital connections anchored our scattered family, technology bridging distances that would have felt impossible a generation ago.
We visited Dad at the high care facility, those hours carrying their own particular weight. Dementia had claimed so much from him, yet when we walked through his door, recognition flickered in his eyes. He knew us still. That simple fact, that he remembered who we were when so many other memories had slipped away, felt like a gift we'd never take for granted. We sat with him, filling the room with gentle conversation, holding onto these moments while they remained possible.
Most mornings, we laced up shoes for walks through the neighbourhood, though the Queensland summer had other ideas. The heat hit differently now. After months in Victoria's milder climate, the subtropical humidity felt foreign despite having lived here for years. Sweat bloomed before we'd completed a single block, our bodies protesting conditions they'd once considered normal.
Between family gatherings and melting walks, Anth continued his endless tinkering. The bus always needed something: adjustments, improvements, repairs that had waited for the right moment. Each task completed felt like preparation for whatever came next, the mechanical meditation that kept our home running smoothly.
Finally, the day arrived. We packed what Anth would need for his thirty-day confinement and pointed the bus toward Grannie and Grandad's place on the Sunshine Coast. Their home sat just fifteen minutes from the airport, the perfect staging ground for early morning departures. One more night of borrowed beds and family warmth before separation claimed us again.Read more
Bikes, Dentists, and Detours
Jan 4–5 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 27 °C
Being back in familiar territory meant access to trusted professionals, and Sal wasted no time booking a dental appointment with Noah, our powerlifting dentist. Having owned a strength gym for many years, there was comfort in sitting in a chair where the person wielding the instruments understood the demands we placed on our bodies. The conversation flowed as easily as the fluoride rinse, talk of training and travel filling the gaps between examinations.
The day before the appointment, we headed south from Gympie, the highway unreeling through landscapes that had once been daily backdrop but now carried the gentle weight of nostalgia. Grannie and Grandad's place offered its usual warm welcome for a single night's stay, their home a reliable waypoint in our Queensland wanderings.
While there, Anth's phone screen lit up with possibility. A second-hand mountain bike had appeared on the local marketplace, specifications promising and price reasonable. Months earlier, Anth had secured his own bike, the anticipation of trail riding building with each passing week. Now Sal could join him, if this one proved suitable.
The dental visit passed without drama, Noah's familiar efficiency making quick work of the check-up. But the day's real mission lay ahead: a longer drive out to Samford, tucked behind Brisbane's suburban sprawl where rural properties still claimed the landscape.
Hunger caught up with us in Samford Valley, neither of us having eaten properly all day. A pizza shop provided salvation, the simple pleasure of hot food restoring energy depleted by driving and waiting rooms. We ate with one eye on the clock, aware that the bike seller expected us and daylight wouldn't last forever.
The rural property revealed itself down a winding driveway, the bike waiting in a shed that smelled of cut grass and stored machinery. We inspected it thoroughly: frame geometry, brake condition, gear shifting, tyre wear. Everything checked out. More than suitable for the trails that awaited us.
The teenager's father, however, had other plans for our afternoon. He loved to chat, and chat he did. Stories of his own cycling days gave way to questions about our bus life, which prompted tales of his mate's caravan adventures, which somehow connected to local council politics, which led to observations about the weather patterns this season. We nodded and smiled, genuinely enjoying his company while watching the shadows lengthen across his paddock.
Eventually, polite farewells were exchanged and the bike loaded into the bus. The floor space it occupied transformed our living area into something resembling a bicycle shop's storeroom, wheels and handlebars creating obstacles where open floor had been.
We briefly considered bush camping somewhere nearby, finding a quiet spot to break up the return journey. But with Sal's new acquisition dominating the interior, the logistics of cooking and sleeping around aluminium and rubber seemed unnecessarily complicated. The sensible choice won: back to Gympie, where we could properly reorganise before the next adventure.
The return drive passed in satisfied silence, two bikes now part of our travelling household. The trails of Queensland awaited, and soon we'd be exploring them together, wheels spinning over terrain that our bus could never reach.Read more
Circle Incomplete: Christmas at Gympie
Dec 23, 2025–Jan 4, 2026 in Australia ⋅ 🌧 25 °C
The final days in Melbourne passed at Jack's place once more, that familiar sanctuary providing base camp while Anth completed his outpatient appointments. The clinical trial's aftermath required follow-up visits, blood draws confirming that his body had processed whatever compound had been tested, paperwork closing the chapter on weeks of confinement. Then, with medical obligations satisfied, the journey home could finally begin.
The route north combined sky and rail: a flight to Brisbane followed by the train to Nambour, each leg bringing Anth closer to reunion. Sal and Sophie tracked his progress through intermittent messages, timing their departure to meet the train's arrival. The platform at Nambour station became the stage for reconnection, weeks of separation dissolving in the particular joy of being complete again.
Well, almost complete. Chia bounded into the reunion with the enthusiasm only dogs possess, Sophie's faithful companion adding four-legged energy to our gathering. The four of us piled into the vehicle and pointed toward Gympie, toward Anth's family, toward Christmas celebrations that had been circled on calendars for months.
The drive carried unexpected weight. Almost two years had passed since we'd departed from this very region, setting off with no fixed timeline, no predetermined endpoint, just the open road and curiosity as guides. That freedom had proven itself wise, our nomadic existence flowing organically from one adventure to the next without the pressure of arbitrary deadlines. Returning now felt like approaching a circle that refused to close. We had travelled so far, yet so much road still called to us. Gympie wasn't an ending but a waypoint, a pause in a journey whose conclusion remained beautifully undefined.
Christmas Day at Grammy's unfolded with the particular magic that only family gatherings can conjure. She had prepared an arsenal of games, activities designed to draw everyone from their corners and into shared laughter. The hours dissolved into competition and collaboration, into jokes that landed and others that groaned, into the kind of unstructured joy that makes certain days stand out in memory's catalogue. One of the best Christmases ever, we agreed later, the assessment carrying no exaggeration.
Yet one absence made itself felt in quiet moments between the laughter. Torrin, our eldest, was spending his Christmas on a different kind of adventure. Somewhere in New Zealand, he celebrated among fellow hikers on the TA track, sharing trail food and stories with strangers who understood why someone might choose mountains over family gatherings. We understood too, recognising in his choice the same wanderlust that had put us on the road. Still, his empty chair at the table, his missing voice in the chorus of celebration, reminded us that our scattered family paid prices for their various freedoms.
The games continued into afternoon, Grammy's seemingly endless supply of activities keeping everyone engaged long past the point where food comas might have claimed us. Sophie and Chia found their rhythm within the chaos, her laughter mixing with the general merriment while her dog navigated the forest of legs beneath the table, hoovering dropped morsels with opportunistic precision.
As evening settled and the day wound toward its natural conclusion, we found ourselves reflecting on the strange mathematics of nomadic life. Two years since departure, countless kilometres behind us, and yet here we sat in the same region where it all began. The circle had brought us back but refused completion, its arc continuing toward horizons we couldn't yet see. This wasn't failure to close a loop but rather recognition that some journeys have no proper endings, only pauses where family gathers before the road calls once more.
Torrin would complete his trail eventually, returning to orbits that might intersect with ours. The bus waited for whatever adventures the new year would bring. And Christmas at Gympie, with its games and laughter and one notable absence, would take its place among the memories that made this unconventional life worth choosing.Read more