The Saying of It Was Enough
Aug 31–Sep 1 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C
We were out of the car park early, before anything else came up the road, and the going was slow again on the way down. The kangaroos were still about. They generally are at that hour, which is the whole reason we try not to be, and on a morning when there is no choice the answer is simply to crawl and keep crawling.
Thirty five minutes or so brought us down into the bottom of Canberra, to Wanniassa and the school, and the day split three ways from there. Sal went in. Anth did the groceries and then took himself back to the Bunnings car park, which is becoming a fixture of these Mondays. Grammy went to Erindale, where there is coffee and something decent to eat, and spent her day the civilised way.
In the afternoon, with Sal collected, we went to Liz's.
The invitation had come about because Sal had mentioned, in passing and without any particular weight, that we had spent a night the week before in the Erindale shopping centre car park. Liz was appalled. So was Jeff. They live under ten minutes from that car park, and the idea that we had been sitting in it overnight while they were at home with a spare driveway and a kitchen did not sit well with either of them. The driveway was offered on the spot, and a meal from Jeff along with it. We had stayed there once before, at the end of last year, so the offer was not a new one so much as a standing one being renewed with some force.
Grammy met us there. Both vehicles went in off the street, and we went up to the house and ate properly, which is to say sitting at a table with food somebody else had cooked and thought about.
It is worth saying plainly that we had not asked. We would have done the car park again, or found somewhere like it, and thought nothing much of the choice. The offer came because Sal happened to say where we had been, a week after the fact, and the saying of it was enough.
Tuesday ran the same shape as Monday. Anth in the Bunnings car park, five minutes from the school this time rather than half an hour. Grammy went north to Higgins to open up the house sit again, where a second and final week was waiting. At the end of the day Anth collected Sal and we went to Erindale for a coffee before driving anywhere, sitting for a while in the same complex the bus had spent a night in, using it the way it is meant to be used and going home to a house afterwards.
Then north across the city to Higgins. One more week of driveways and hot water, and after that, back to it.Read more
Both Flanks of the Valley
Aug 30–31 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C
Six kilometres across the valley floor, and most of it taken at a crawl. The kangaroos were everywhere that morning, standing in the road and beside it and behind whatever bush they had chosen to appear from, and there is a record at stake in that situation. Nearly three years on the road and we have never hit an animal. Not one. It is not luck, or not entirely: it is driving slowly, and it is not driving at dawn or dusk or after dark if there is any way to avoid it. Whole days get shaped around that rule. So the six kilometres took a while.
There were a fair few cars at the tracking station when we got there, which told us the walks branching out from it were being used. We kitted up, boots and packs and poles, and set off on the ten kilometre round trip to the Granite Tors. Grammy stayed with her van. She had the tracking station to herself for most of the day, and she went through it properly, reading every information board on the site. The station itself is the same story as Honeysuckle: concrete foundations, footings, the shape of something that used to be there. The two sites sit only a couple of kilometres apart as a bird would measure it, Honeysuckle north of here and over the ridge, a long way round by road. Two dishes in the same range, both pointed at the same sky, both reduced now to slabs in the grass.
Five kilometres up. That is the honest description of the outward leg, a steady climb that does not let up much, and the poles earned their place. At the top the old observatory is still standing, which after two sets of foundations felt like a small act of defiance. We went through it, sat down, ate something, and then took the loop track out among the tors.
Huge granite boulders, stacked and balanced and split, standing in among the ghost gums. From up there we could look straight across the valley to Legoland on the far side, where we had stood a fortnight earlier after riding five kilometres uphill out of Honeysuckle. Two formations facing each other across the same ground, one on each flank, and we had now been on both. Along with the ridge above and the valley floor below, the place was starting to feel properly known rather than merely visited.
We went after a couple of caches while we were up there and did not find either of them. That happens more often than the successes get credit for. What it does, though, is send you clambering into gaps between boulders you would have walked straight past, and looking at the underside of overhangs you had no reason to look at, and the not finding is a small price for the looking. It did that here.
The descent was the descent. Five kilometres of giving it all back, and much easier than the climb, and we were at the bottom with an hour or so of daylight still going.
The car park had emptied while we were up there. The day walkers had gone home and the kangaroos had come back out, spread through the grass in every direction. Sal went into the bus, the cold having arrived with the low sun. Anth put a jumper on and went back out on foot through the tracking station, working the caches around the site, and came back with enough of them to square the ledger against the two he had missed at the top.
The last car left. That settled it. Rather than driving anywhere in the dark, with the kangaroos out and the record to think about, we stayed where we were and made a camp of the car park. It was quiet up there, quieter than the campground had been, and the valley held it all night. In the morning the bus would go back into the city and Sal would do two days at Trinity.Read more
Five Days That Will Not Vanish
Aug 25–30 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C
The drizzle came with us out of town and gave up somewhere on the road south, and by the time the bus came down into Orroral the cloud was pulling apart over the ridgeline.
The camp sits at the head of the Orroral Valley. A fortnight earlier we had ridden five kilometres uphill out of Honeysuckle to the boulders at Legoland and stood looking down into it, a long trough of pale grass held on both sides by the range. Now we were on the floor of the same valley looking back up at where we had been standing. Anth knew the ground regardless, from the end of last year, the corridor that had taken him through the Cotter and Honeysuckle and on to Mount Clear. Third of those four, come back to with the bus and with company this time.
Grammy had beaten us there. She had driven straight from Higgins while we did the second placement day, found the camp, taken a spot that suited her and left room alongside, and in the process had handed us the one patch of ground in the place that would hold a Starlink signal. That mattered more than it sounds. Wednesday was a full day of SMART Recovery meetings for Sal, video sessions run to a timetable with people at the other end of them, and a connection that drops is not an inconvenience but a failure. Whether she worked that out or simply parked where she liked the look of, the result was the same.
Wednesday went the way it needed to. After that the week opened up.
We walked twice. A kilometre or so out to the rock pools first, easy ground, done and back well before the day got away. The longer one waited for the end of an afternoon, up the valley with the sun dropping, because that was the hour Anth had been out here jogging last year when the place turned out to be full of kangaroos. It repeated itself and improved on the repetition. There were more of them this time, well spread through the grass in the flat light, taking almost no notice of us.
The camp stood among ghost gums and the birds ran all day. Not the occasional call but a continuous overlapping business of them, more species than could be picked apart, going from early light and not letting up until it did.
The Pomoly went every night. It has crossed over from being equipment we carry to being simply how the evening works, lit without anyone proposing it. Sal had another go at damper and then went further, setting the camp oven on top of the fire with a curry in it, which came out well.
She also made a video. Nothing elaborate, an update for the travel channel, where we were and what the last stretch had looked like. Her coursework had finished eight days earlier, and this was the first thing she had made because she wanted to rather than because it was due.
Which is roughly where the thought landed. It is not our line and we cannot say where we picked it up: routine is the killer of time. The gym years proved it well enough. Whole years went past in that place and left almost nothing behind, each week filed under the same heading as the one before it, until we looked up and could not account for where any of it had gone. Out here it runs the other way. One of us will say do you remember that campsite, and it will feel like a year ago, and it will turn out to have been three weeks. Two days a week in Canberra is going to be routine, and the routine will disappear the way routine does. The five days out here will not.
Then the weekend, doing what weekends do. Cars came in, the sites filled, the valley acquired neighbours. And on the Sunday morning, before the bus went anywhere else, we took the short drive around the corner to the Orroral Valley tracking station.Read more
The Rule We Had Never Broken
Aug 24–25 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
Two days a week created a problem that one day a week never had. A Monday on its own is a drive in and a drive out. A Monday with a Tuesday behind it means a night in the middle, and the night has to happen somewhere, and somewhere was going to be in town rather than out of it. We knew that on the way in and decided to deal with it later.
Grammy stayed behind at the Higgins house. Her plan was to run straight out to the next campsite from there under her own steam, which she was well capable of doing, so the convoy came apart for the day without ceremony. The commute south to Trinity took what it takes. Sal went in.
Anth's day was Bunnings. Not the shop so much as the car park, which is one of the great neutral spaces of Australian life, and he spent a good part of the day there working through the small jobs a bus accumulates and never quite gets around to. Nothing worth describing individually. All of it worth doing, and this was exactly the sort of day to do it on, with hours to fill and a flat surface underneath.
Sal came out in the afternoon and the bus collected her and took the five minutes down the road to Erindale, where there was coffee and somewhere to sit and the light starting to go. Afterwards we had a wander around the area to see what might work for the night, and the wander did not turn up anything better than what we were already standing in. So we stayed. The bus spent the night in a shopping centre car park.
There was more to the reasoning than convenience. Rain was coming, and rain changes what a campsite is. A dirt camp in the wet turns soft, and five and half tonnes of bus on soft ground is a problem you create for yourself in the evening and solve badly in the morning. Bitumen does not do that. Beyond the surface, the tavern across the road was open late, which meant vehicles coming and going and a car park that was not going to look strange with something parked in it. A bus is conspicuous in an empty lot and almost invisible in a busy one.
Anth slept fine. Sal did not. The rain came through in the night and came down hard, and rain on a roof is one of the better things about living in a vehicle, ordinarily enough to put the pair of us under within minutes. It was not enough here. It laid itself over the town without covering it, and everything underneath kept coming through: engines, doors, voices, the general low churn of a place that does not properly stop. Sal is a light sleeper at the best of times and a town at night is not the best of times. She lay awake through a good deal of it and came out the other side with a firm position, which was that next time there would either be earplugs involved or there would not be a next time.
In two and a half years on the road we had never done this. Not once. The rule, unspoken but consistent, had always been to make the extra drive and get clear of the town before stopping, and we had kept to it from Queensland to Tasmania and back up again without ever really examining why. Now we had broken it for a shopping centre car park in Canberra, and the only thing that could be said in its favour was the thing that had made us do it.
Five minutes to the school gate in the morning. That was the entire argument, and the rain had made it a better one than it deserved to be. Whether it was worth the night underneath was Sal's to decide, and she had a week to think it over before the question came round again.Read more
The Evenings Came Back
Aug 18–24 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
Another footpath, this one at Higgins, on the north-western side of the city. The bus went up on it and stopped, and that was the week arranged. It occurred to us, parking there, that this was probably the shape of the season ahead and not a one off: a stretch in the bush, a couple of days in town, and every so often a house with a driveway and somebody else's kettle.
House sits are not a compromise. They are showers that do not have to be thought about, and laundry done properly, and above all a flat sealed surface to work on. Anything that needs doing to a bus is easier when you are not lying on gravel with dirt working its way into your collar. So we made use of it.
The bus got a real wash. Not the sort it usually gets, which is a hose or a bucket of lake water and a quick pass over the worst of it, done when we happened to remember and skipped when we did not. This was the first proper wash since we left, which is to say the first since January 2024. Every panel, every seam, the frames and the runners and all the places where two and a half years of Australian roads had quietly accumulated and set. Two and a half years is a long time for anything to go unattended, and the bus came up looking like a vehicle somebody owned rather than one that had simply survived a lot of country. Anth followed it with an oil and filter change, the engine given the same attention as the body, both halves of the arrangement that keeps a house moving.
The house sit was not properly ours. The owner was a friend of Jan's and Jan was the usual sitter, but the owner was happy enough to have us instead, so Jan came and went across the week as she pleased and the house held whoever was in it. We slept in the bus regardless. There is a bed in there that has been shaped to us for two and a half years and a spare room in a strange house does not compete.
Then Sal finished. Her last online tutorial ran and ended and that was the coursework done, all of it, with nothing left in the degree except the placement itself. It had come apart in pieces rather than all at once: the assignments first, back at Mannus Lake in July, and now the lectures and tutorials, the last scheduled obligation of two years of study. Nobody handed her anything. A tutorial simply ended and did not have another one behind it.
What that produced, more than anything, was hours. Anth had been holding a new board game in reserve for exactly this, Eternal Decks, bought in hope rather than expectation, because board games have always been more his enthusiasm than hers. Sal will play one now and then and be perfectly pleasant about it. This one she took to completely. It became her favourite, which nobody saw coming, and we played it nearly every night that week, with Jan sitting in for a couple of rounds when she was about. We had not played a game together since she started the course. That is the part worth putting down. Two years of assignments and workshops and intensives had quietly taken the evenings, one at a time, without ever announcing that it was doing so, and the evenings came back the same way.
The same week, down in Melbourne, Torrin started a fifty day trial. Fifty days is a serious commitment of a body, and it would more than cover Canada, which meant the ski season with Shea was no longer a thing being hoped for. Parents worry about the arrangements their children make, particularly the ones that involve signing up for fifty days of anything. There was relief in it for him and a different sort of relief for us: not that he was safe, but that the thing he wanted was now going to happen.
On the Sunday night Grammy arrived. Family were coming to the place she had been staying, so she came up and joined us for the last night of the house sit, and the group was whole again for an evening before Monday and the new two day rhythm took hold of the week.Read more
It Changed on a Number
Aug 17–18 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 12 °C
Monday had a shape to it now. Down to the south of the city first, Tuggeranong end, to drop Sal at Trinity, and then the day belonged to the list: groceries, water, the small parts and bits and pieces that a bus quietly accumulates a need for. Town day. There is a particular satisfaction in a day made entirely of errands when the errands are the price of living the way we live, and Anth worked through them without hurrying.
Then the day changed, and it changed on a number. Sal was offered a second placement day. Tuesdays, starting the following week, on top of the Mondays already running. The offer was worth more than a second day of work, because the requirement was forty hours of one-on-one and forty hours accumulates twice as fast at two days a week as it does at one. In a single conversation the length of the Canberra stint had been cut in half. Not shortened, halved, and the difference between those two words is the difference between waiting out a season and seeing the end of one.
Next week it would start. For now there was still the house sit at Higgins waiting on the other side of the city, and the evening had its own commitment.
North, then, back up to Nicholls and Jan's, because it was Jess's birthday. Vietnamese had been decided on some time earlier and Vietnamese it was, the whole table of us out for the night, the sort of evening that has nothing to do with the road and is better for it. It ran long in the way birthday dinners do.
By the time it finished and we came back to the bus, parked out the front of Jan's where it had been parked before, nobody had much appetite for crossing the city again in the dark to reach a house we had not yet seen. Higgins would keep until morning. So the bus stayed where it was for the night, and we slept on the same stretch of Nicholls footpath we had slept on two weeks earlier at the start of all this.
Two weeks earlier there had been two vehicles on it, and Grammy's roof had been up, and the whole thing had happened by accident because she had lost a night's sleep worrying about a hill. This time there was one vehicle, parked deliberately, and Grammy was at the far southern end of Canberra waiting on a Thursday appointment to find out what her rear wheel had to say for itself.Read more
Where the Sky Got Through
Aug 10–17 in Australia ⋅ 🌧 6 °C
Canberra gave up almost at once. Ten minutes of suburb and then paddocks, and then the paddocks steepened and became foothills, and the road stopped running straight and started working its way up into Namadgi. Honeysuckle Campground sat further south again from the Cotter, up where the country turns properly to mountain, and the plan was a week there before Monday brought us back in. Anth knew the ground. He had spent a single night here late in 2025, on the same run through this corridor that had taken in the Cotter, Orroral and Mount Clear, one stop in a string of them.
The bus went into the same spot he had used that night, and not for sentiment. There is exactly one place at Honeysuckle where the trees let enough sky through to run the portable panels out and hold a Starlink connection, and that place is a matter of geometry rather than preference. Sal still had her online SMART Recovery groups to run alongside the placement, which meant the connection was not negotiable. So the bus went where the sky was, the panels came out onto the ground, and Grammy pulled in alongside with requirements that were, as ever, a fraction of ours.
The ground had been chosen for its sky before. Honeysuckle was a tracking station once, one of the dishes that worked with Parkes through the Apollo missions and carried the signal when men were walking on the moon. What survives is concrete: foundations, footings, the flat pads where the structure stood. Nothing above knee height. It is an odd thing to park a bus not far from a set of slabs laid down to talk to the moon and then run a cable out to a small white terminal doing roughly the same job on a smaller scale, and to be doing it so that a woman can hold a support group meeting with people scattered across the country. The purpose of the clearing has not changed as much as the hardware has.
The week was quiet in the way that midweek in a national park is quiet. The occasional camper came in, stayed a night, went. Mostly we had it. The wildlife did not, in any sense, keep its distance: small kangaroos and wallabies that had long since worked out people are harmless came grazing to within a few steps of the chairs, close enough to touch if touching them had been the done thing. Nearly all of them carried joeys, heads out of pouches, watching everything with the unbothered interest of an animal that has never had a reason to run. Satin bowerbirds came through in groups, working the campsite over methodically for anything that had been dropped, and finding, one assumes, enough to justify the visit.
One day we walked, taking geocaches as they came, so Sal could see what was left of the station. Another day the weather came up fine and we took the bikes to Orroral. Five kilometres of climbing to get there, three quarters of an hour of it, an hour if the legs were honest, and at the top of it Legoland: a run of enormous granite boulders stacked along the ridge above the Orroral Valley, stacked in a way that looks deliberate and is not. We walked around them for a while and looked down over the valley. Then fifteen minutes back down, the entire climb given back at once, which is the arrangement bikes offer and the reason people keep riding up things.
Midweek a four wheel drive pulled in and a fellow got out and came over to apologise. Anth asked what for. It turned out a car rally was finishing here late that afternoon, raising money for children with kidney disease, and he wanted us to know in advance that every site in the campground was about to be taken. They arrived on schedule and in vehicles of every description, and they filled the place completely. The Pomoly was already going by then. A few of them drifted over to stand around it, and there was a yarn, and then at some point they were all back in their cars and gone to wherever they had come from, and the campground was empty again as though none of it had happened.
Then the weekend, and weekends bring people. The ground filled with tents and a scattering of vehicles, and the kangaroos, who had spent five days grazing at our feet, made themselves scarce and stayed that way. The crowd thinned out on the Sunday. We had the place to ourselves for one more night.
Monday was Trinity College again, half an hour in, the second placement day. It was also the first parting. Grammy had a noise coming from a rear wheel that wanted a mechanic's opinion rather than a driver's, and she had arranged to stay with someone she knew nearby while it was looked at. We were going the other way, to a house sit at Higgins for the week. Since Gympie, since the sixth of June, the convoy had been two vehicles and had not once been anything else.
The panels came up off the ground and went back into their allocated spot, the cable came in, and the clearing went back to being a clearing. The slabs stayed where they had been since before any of us were paying attention, waiting on the next thing that needed a clear view of the sky. Down through the foothills the road straightened out and the paddocks came back, and then somewhere on the edge of the city it divided and Grammy's van went one way and the bus went the other. It took about four seconds. Seven days, and a meeting point already agreed, and nothing about it worth calling a separation. But the mirror was empty the whole way in, and Anth kept checking it anyway.Read more
A Monday That Finished at Three
Aug 9–10 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 12 °C
The Cotter was not actually any closer to Trinity College. That was worth admitting up front, because the whole point of moving there was proximity and the map did not support it. What it did offer was a run in that avoided the worst of the Canberra morning, and on the night before a first day, avoiding traffic counts for more than saving kilometres. So the bus came down off Jan's street on the Sunday afternoon with Grammy behind it and turned west out of the city, and we were parked at the Cotter Campground not long before dark.
Rain came with the last of the light. Not much of it, the kind that settles in without ever committing, but enough to keep everybody inside. Grammy's van went in nearby and stayed shut. The bus did what it does on a wet evening, which is become very small and very warm, and we stayed in it.
Anth had been here before. Late in 2025, during the long separation, he had spent a couple of nights at the Cotter on his own while Sal was elsewhere, one of the quiet stops in a stretch of quiet stops. He remembered the shape of the place. Sal remembered it too, but from much further back, from a childhood in Canberra when the Cotter was somewhere families went on a weekend and the river was for swimming in. She had not set foot there since. It is a strange thing, arriving somewhere in the dark with a partner who knows it from eight months ago and finding that you know it from thirty years ago, and that neither of you can see anything out of the window to check it against.
The amenities block was across the way and the temperature had dropped to something with real intent in it. Anth went for a shower anyway. There is a calculation that gets made about these things, the walk over in the cold against the hot water at the end of it, and the walk back in the cold afterwards with wet hair, and on this occasion the calculation came out in favour. He came back moving quickly and did not linger outside.
Monday started early, earlier than the drive required. Sal was not going to be late. Two years of assignments, workshops in Melbourne and Brisbane, intensives, the long separations that paid for them, all of it had been building toward a day that would begin with finding the right building and parking somewhere sensible, and she was not going to have it start with an apology. The bus went into the city in the grey and dropped her, and that was that. She walked in. The rest of the day belonged to her and nobody else was going to be able to help with any of it.
Anth and Grammy went to the Aldi. There is no dignifying that. On the morning that closed out two years of work, the other half of the household did a grocery top-up: the trolley, the aisles, the things that had run down over a week at Gundaroo, the packing at the end where you move quickly because everyone behind you is waiting. It took the time it took. Then there was the rest of the day to get through, and no particular way to get through it except by doing ordinary things slowly and checking the phone more often than was useful.
Just after three, the message came. Sal was finished.
We drove back in and collected her. There is not much to report from the drive, which is itself the report: no crisis, no disaster, no story to tell about it. A day had been done and it had gone the way days go. The thing that had loomed over the last stretch of the journey, the final obstacle between Sal and the end of a Masters of Counselling, turned out to be a Monday that started early and finished just after three.
Day one done. There would be more of them, one a week, stacked up between now and whenever the hours were satisfied, and the shape of the coming months was now fully visible: a day in the city, then out again to whatever ground we had found for the week. But the first one is the one that proves it can be done at all. The rest are just the rest.Read more
Thirty Minutes Out, Thirty Back
Aug 4–9 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C
Gundaroo sat ten minutes past the state line and thirty from Jan's front door, which was the entire reason for choosing it. The recreation reserve was a strip of ground behind a small town oval, the sort of free camp that exists in every second country town in New South Wales and asks nothing of anybody. We had it to ourselves. Anth took the bus up the back where the mown grass gave out at the fence, well away from the gate, and Grammy brought her van in ahead of him. Two vehicles in a corner, an empty oval between us and the road, and a week to spend in it.
The nights went down to about zero and frost lay on the grass most mornings until the sun cleared the trees. The diesel heaters stayed off. A public ground is not the place to run one, and the bus held its warmth well enough without help, so the cold was simply accepted the way you accept weather you have chosen to live in. A few caravans came through over the week. All of them stopped nearer the gate, none of them came up the back, and the corner stayed as quiet on the last night as it had been on the first.
Anth took the bike out for geocaches. He had always walked them, since the Tasmanian mornings when a find meant boots and a loop and coming back with the day already half spent. This time he rode, and picked up everything the town had to offer in one pass, moving through cold streets at a pace that let him see where he was without stopping to think about it. Coming back past the toilet block he fell in with an older fellow from the local men's shed. The man may have given his name; if he did, Anth did not catch it. What he did catch was the town: who was doing what, what the shed had on, which local matters were currently worth an opinion. Anth mostly listened. It cost a quarter of an hour and he was still turning it over when he got back to the bus.
Thirty minutes away, Sal was in a house. Not the placement yet, that was still days off, but the week before it, spent in a kitchen with a kettle and a spare bed and two people she had known most of her life. Jan, and Sophie for the first part of it, the three of them with nothing to pack and nowhere to be by dark. Then Sophie went back to Sydney, the way she had before and would again, her own road running to its own schedule now. Sal stayed on at Jan's. Anth stayed on at the oval.
Then the last weekend arrived and took the ground over completely. Nosework, formal scent detection, a lead-in to the nationals, which made it a serious event rather than a local novelty. Handlers had come from a distance. Cars filled everything that could be parked on, crates came out of boots, and the far half of the oval turned organised and purposeful for two days. Spectators were not allowed. Anth got as close as the perimeter and no closer. Grammy did considerably better. Her van sat at the edge of the activity and she got talking to owners as they came and went, collecting the thing in pieces across the weekend, and handed it all over to Anth in the evenings: what the breeds were, how a search was laid out, what a dog did with itself in the moment it found what it had been sent in for. He had watched vehicles arrive and leave all day and understood none of it. By the end of Grammy's account he understood a fair amount.
Sunday, and the drive back in to collect Sal. Thirty minutes, the state line twice, paddocks and then houses. Sophie was already gone. Monday would start the placement properly, one day a week in Canberra, which left the rest of every week free to be somewhere else entirely. That was the arrangement, and it had just been tested for the first time without either of us particularly noticing it was a test. A week at an oval ten minutes over the border. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back. Not much of a distance at all, once it had been driven.Read more
Twenty Steps From the Front Door
Aug 3–4 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C
The bus came up over the kerb and stood the whole way on the footpath, five and a half tonnes of Toyota Coaster parked clear of the road in a street of Canberra houses. Grammy brought her van in ahead of it and popped the roof. Two vehicles built for riverbanks and forestry dirt, drawn up on suburban concrete, and neither of them looking sorry about it.
We had come for Sophie. Two and a half weeks of unclaimed road had been handed back the week before at Mannus Lake, when she rang to say she would be in Canberra to see Jess. The road would still be there in a fortnight. Sophie would not still be in Canberra. It had been almost two months since the Gympie driveway, since Torrin and Mack and Soph stood in the gravel and watched the convoy pull out, and she looked well, and she talked the way she always did when there was a great deal to say and not much time to say it in.
The plan was narrow and practical. Drop Sal at the house, say hello properly, then Grammy and Anth would carry on out of the city and find a camp before dark. It lasted about an hour. Grammy had not slept at Blowering, not for a minute of it, lying awake in her van over whether the thing would climb back out of the reservoir in the morning. It had climbed out easily enough, Anth at her wheel and Sal leading in the bus, but the night was spent all the same and it was still on her face. Nobody made a case for pushing on. We stayed where we were and slept on the footpath.
Jan cooked. It had been a long time since a meal arrived at a table nobody had lit a fire for, or balanced on a knee, longer still since the walls around one had stayed where they were put in the wind. Jan and Jess, Sophie, Sal, Grammy, plates going round and three conversations running over the top of one another. Then goodnight, and out into the cold to our own beds, twenty steps from the front door, asleep early like people who had been driving for weeks.
In the morning Anth went back through WikiCamps and reconsidered. What he found was a recreation reserve half an hour out, closer than anything he had been looking at the night before, and half an hour bought the entire day. There was suddenly no reason to be anywhere.
So he washed the bikes. They had ridden on the back of the bus since Gympie and they carried the proof of it, two months of country laid on and dried on and laid over again, red dust and black soil and pale farm grit and the last of the Bago forestry road. The hose took it off in a few minutes. It went down the gutter in a thin brown stream and into a Canberra stormwater drain. Two months of road, gone in a few minutes of tap water.
Before the bus moved, Anth and Sal and Sophie sat down at the table and played a board game. It took as long as it took. Nobody was waiting on anybody.
Then the farewells, indoors, in the house, not out at the kerb with the engine running. Anth said goodbye to Soph without a date attached to it. She had her own van now and her own road, and the two roads had stopped running parallel some time ago. He did not know when he would see her next and did not pretend otherwise. Then out the front door and up into the bus.
Sal stayed. Her bag went inside and the week ahead of her had a shape it had not had in two years: nothing to submit, nothing outstanding, only Monday morning and the placement itself, the last thing standing between her and the end of the whole thing. Anth would come back on Sunday to collect her.
The bus came down off the footpath with Grammy's van behind it, and the drive out took thirty minutes, which barely counted as leaving. A recreation reserve, free, unremarkable except for the distance. Six days, then Sunday.
None of it had been the plan. By the plan, Anth would have said goodbye to his daughter in the street with the engine running and driven out of the city in the last of the light. Instead there had been a dinner, a night on the footpath, a slow morning, a board game, and a farewell said properly indoors with nothing waiting on it. All of it bought by a night Grammy spent awake in her van above a reservoir, worrying about a hill her van climbed without any trouble at all. Anth thought about that for most of the thirty minutes, and did not say so.Read more
The Sign Had Been Right
Aug 2–3 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C
A sign at the boundary of Bago State Forest said there were brumbies about. We had come an hour northeast of Mannus on the bitumen before turning left onto the dirt, and the sign was the first thing the forest gave us.
It had been harvested not long before and it looked it, the ground opened up and the stumps still pale. Work trucks and utes came past us the whole way in, men with somewhere to be on a Sunday. Blowering Reservoir lay down in the valley, a long way down, and somewhere in the folds of country between us and the water were the forestry roads we hoped would let us reach it. We had one night in there. After it came Canberra, and after Canberra came weeks of not moving at all.
Of the brumbies there was no sign but the evidence, horse manure in the middle of the road, dropped by animals long gone. What we got instead was three emus at the edge of the cleared ground. We slowed right down and watched them watch us, and then one of them broke and ran across in front of the bus, all knees and indecision.
Google Maps attempted to send us right, onto a track that did not exist. This has stopped being remarkable. We carried on until we found a road that was actually a road and took it down in first gear with the exhaust brake working harder than it has worked in a long while, the corners tight enough and steep enough that we went at them one at a time. Grammy came down behind us at her own pace. Neither of us said anything about the climb back out, though we were both doing the arithmetic.
The prime position at Island Point was taken. A crew of workmen had been camped there across the weekend and were packing as we came in, Sunday afternoon, work in the morning. We took what was left and did not mind. One night does not need the best spot.
We set up the Pomoly and fed it the timber we had cut at Mannus, which had ridden two days with us to get here, and huddled in around the heat while the valley went dark.
Anth walked the shore before the light went and found the other sites, several of them better than the one the workmen were leaving, tucked closer to the water with the hill at their backs. He noted where they were. There would be another time, presumably. That is the thing we tell ourselves about places we like and leave, and often enough it turns out to be true.
Grammy did not sleep. Not a minute of it, she told us in the morning. She had lain in the van running the descent backwards in her head, every switchback of it, unable to see how the van was going to get up.
We were packed early, which is easy when almost nothing came out in the first place. Sal took the driver's seat of the bus and led off. Anth drove Grammy's van. There are years of four-wheel driving behind him and none of it suggested the hill would be a problem, and it was not. Both vehicles walked up without complaint. The thing Grammy had been awake all night for was over before she had finished being frightened of it.
At the top we stopped to work out the best way on, backtracked a short distance, and then stopped again in the middle of the road, because there they were. Five or six of them out in the cleared ground where the forest had been taken off, heads up, watching us watch them. Brumbies. The sign had been right the whole time, just not on our schedule. We sat in the road and looked at them for as long as they would allow it.
Then Batlow, which grows apples, and north through Tumut, and out onto the highway at Gundagai for the last of it.
The northern edge of Canberra is an odd piece of country. You are in rolling farmland with sheep on it and cattle on it, New South Wales doing what New South Wales does, and then you cross a line on a map and it is suburbia, immediately, with nothing in between to warn you it is coming. Ten minutes after the last paddock we turned into Jan's street and parked the bus outside a house.Read more
Nobody Camps Here in July
Jul 28–Aug 2 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.
Five 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
TravelerDid you take Anth to our old house? Or say hello to Celia?
TravelerPS gorgeous photo Sal xx
TravelerThanks Ma 🙏. Didn't see Celia this time.