What’s Letters From the Road?
Really short version
The title is pretty self explanatory.
Sorta short version
Travel writing in bite size chunks. One journal entry sent to you, once a week.
Short version with elaboration
Ok, there’s nothing too complicated here, but I suppose a few more details wouldn’t hurt. I recently went on a road trip around Australia and want to share the experience with you. Letters From The Road will be for lovers of travel writing, memoir, essay, and a bit of daft and self deprecating humour. As a subscriber, each week you’ll receive a new letter from me, a journal entry from somewhere in the Australian outback. These are my actual word-for-word journal entries, so this might appeal to those weirdo voyeurs and sticky beaks amongst you as well. Whatever, everyone’s welcome.
The full spiel
In the end of 2019, I went on a massive road trip around Australia with my wife Katie and our two boys Henry and Oscar. We were on the road for just over three months and drove 16,516 kilometers (10,262 miles) of dusty red tracks, lived in dusty campsites, and woke up every day with a dusty patina. Dusty being generous, though on the plus side it succeeded in making me look permanently tan, and tanning is something I do only slightly above the level of a hairless pig.
The Letters From the Road newsletter will chronicle the journey from Melbourne and back again via the back roads. It will be part travelogue, part journal and not really a newsletter at all. One letter, once per week, until I’ve finished the story.
What I am hoping for is that this will be almost as if I were sending you letters from the road throughout our trip: each one a postcard from a new place, me keeping you updated on where we’ve been, what odd ball character we’ve come across, little snippets of intimacy.
The best way I can think of to do this, since we’re not actually on the road and I had this idea several years too late (which unfortunately is my normal operating speed), is to share my daily journals with you. I wrote nearly 100 of them over the course of the trip, and as a subscriber you’ll receive a new journal entry each week along with some thoughts I have about it in the light of day, 3 years on.
The journal entries will be supplied nearly as-is, save for some cleanup. They won’t be sanitised, stylized, or posed for Instagram - all the curse words remain. In a word, you’ll get all the good and the bad and hear what it’s really like to spend 3 months driving across the wild and unbelievable country that is Australia.
A little trip background
2019 seemed to be a good time for a reset. I was approaching nearly 20 years as a working stiff in very similar feeling jobs, and things were feeling stale. Katie had hit a bad patch at work, so when I approached her about quitting our jobs and taking a year off to travel and mess around - not in the literal, on the couch when you’re 16 and pretending to watch a movie sense, but maybe a little bit - she was vulnerable to being convinced. Our boys were of the ages - 13 and 11 - where we thought they would both remember and appreciate the trip, while not having their education completely shattered. So we took the leap.
I’ve always loved a good road trip. And whether by design or just by leaning in to what felt good, 2019 turned into one long one.
We began in January with 4 months in South America, then hijacked my parents’ Toyota Highlander and drove it all over North America until September. On the 1st of October we drove out from Melbourne in the direction of the middle, not to return for another 3 months.
I’ve written many stories about North and South America over on Medium, in case you’re interested. This story about hard times in the Galapagos Islands and this one about finding the secret to getting old in the American South were two of the most popular ones.
Coming at the tail end of our year spent on the road, we were all a bit surly at the start of our Australia drive.
‘Do you think we’ve had enough together time yet?’ Oscar asked Katie, not long after we’d jumped in the car.
Pre-teen boys have a naturally surly disposition, but having just spent 9 months in close quarters, Oscar and Henry had moved to higher alert. The jets had been scrambled, missiles were at the ready.
And we were headed for the Australian outback, a desert wasteland on a good day, but just plain crippling miserable on the cusp of summer when we’d decided to set off. So it might have been a bit misguided to tack on another hard 10,000 miles onto the thousands of miles we’d already driven.
No, Oscar, we need another 12 weeks wrapped in a heavy canvas tent, crammed in a car, then thrown into an oven, I imagined telling him. Family road trip-cum-kidnapping.
What we ended up with was wonderful and hard and a family experience full of joy and grief that ultimately made me rethink - several times - why we travel like this in the first place.
Some trip highlights you can look forward to
Meeting the peanut butter lady, owner of the non-operational petrol station at Coombah Station.
Catching hammerhead sharks with Duncan the Drunken.
Surviving sandstorms, floods, and infestations.
A running tally of how many times each of us had to dig a hole and start a fire to go poop in the bush.
And seeing some of the finest landscapes in the world, places that also happen to have magical names: Karijini, Uluru, and Purnululu - a mountain range that looks like giant red beehives.
The idea sounds good, but how do I know your journals aren’t terrible?
I cannot claim that I’m a published author or internet influencer or anything like that. But I have been doing a bit of practicing at my writing.
Copywriting is my day job, making up words for companies who cannot do it themselves.
I’ve also been journalling all my life, starting when I was in second grade when I received my first diary. It was about the size of a giant phone, had a dark brown faux leather cover decorated with some sort of pattern, and a lock that kept other people from opening it. Having a lock meant that the diary was for secrets, so I wrote one or two things about this girl Emily that I thought was pretty great in second grade, but that was about it.
Since then, I’ve experimented with different sizes, shapes, fancy $35 Moleskines, and notebooks that were given to me by my employer as part of a company effort to help people get organised. I no longer hide my journals under the bed and lock them up, like I did with my first one. Some are on a shelf, some are in boxes, but all are filled up with observations and little bits of life I thought were important at the time.
Here are some that I pulled out for you:
Monday, June 22, 2009
I just started using a new bodywash. I can’t quite place the scent, but it reminds me the most of urinal cake.
Ok, maybe you need something more that that, something with a little travel flavour.
Tuesday December 31, 2013
Cathedral Ranges State Park
Reflecting on camping.
I like the process by the guy who camped next to us last night when he arrived.
Step 1 - unload chair
Step 2 - unload flask
Step 3 - drink from flask
Step 4 - sit in chair, crack beer
Step 5 - watch as son unloads truck
A 5-step program for camping success.
And one more for good measure. People like things that come in threes, apparently.
5th November 2013
In Bed
Yesterday I was out in the field behind our house putting in an effort at some exercise. I was not quite finished when out of the garage pops Oscar with his little bike. Katie helps him get the bike over the retaining wall and onto the field, and there he was, ready to practice. Seeing as how I was in the middle of my workout, and feeling all beat down, I was none too excited at this turn of events. Interruptions kill me.
But there Oscar was, ready to go, and so I relented. I got him situated and pedaling, my hand on his back simultaneously pushing and holding him up.
‘You can let go now,’ he says, and so I did, and after that he just rode. For the first time in his short life, he’s riding a bike slowly through the grass around the field.
My pride and the sight of him with his big grin erased any of the dark cloud in my head that was salty at being interrupted. Sometimes interruptions are good things, I guess, and if you don’t let them happen every once in a while, you might miss something good. Like Oscar, riding a bike for the first time.
Ready? Let’s go find some red dirt and unicorns.
