Welcome to Letters From the Road! This is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time using journal entries written during the trip.
Back in 2019, I took a year off of regular life to travel with my wife and our two boys, and we spent 9 months in South America, the U.S., Canada, followed by the aforementioned 3 months driving around Australia.
This is only the second letter, so you haven’t missed much! Need to catch up on the first one? Have a read of it here. Really like to do your background research? There’s a bit more about the trip and Letters From the Road here.
In this letter, I’ve got not one but three journal entries for you, and that’s despite the fact that we’re only sort of travelling, instead focusing on making the last preparations for the road.
Thanks so much for reading. I’m excited to have you here, and I hope you stick around to enjoy many more.
Luke
Three weeks and 10,000 miles is a long time to be in travel limbo.
Travel limbo is like transiting in an airport, stopping over just long enough to use the bathroom and buy a joyless overpriced sandwich suffocated by plastic that was made 6 hours ago, before hopping on another plane. You’re somewhere, but in body only. The place could be anywhere, so your mind is looking ahead.
Typical travel limbo, something you might have experienced yourself, might last a couple of hours. It could be a day if you’ve done a poor job of trip planning, or if you’ve only paid for the most awkward and grungy of flights. You’ll get no judgement from me - as you’re probably aware I’m a cheapskate, so awkward flights are part of my base package. A few years ago, I routed a trip through Guangzhou, China when flying from Melbourne to the U.S. This turned a normally painful 14 hour trip with two little kids into a marathon slog of 48 hours, and included an overnight at a hotel featuring cardboard beds and a wet market next door. But I’m certain I saved a decent chunk of money, and the armpit-high pile of dead turtles at the market was well worth the stop.
Our limbo started in Iowa, when Katie, the boys, and I, arrived at my parents’ house, fresh from our road trip around the U.S. and Canada. We then unpacked and repacked, changed location from Iowa to Australia, unpacked and repacked again, and finally hit the road out of Melbourne. Even though this spanned three weeks and 10,000 miles (16,100 kilometres) of travel distance, we weren’t really travelling.
Maybe the cure for travel limbo is always being mindful and present, focusing on and enjoying the now. But I’m unsure of the value of staying present when you’re in transit like we were. Maybe this?
17 September 2019, Some Airplane
Guy just walked past us on the plane wearing a singlet with the number 69 on the back. Where the name would normally be, like with a sports jersey, it says RSVP.
When I was able to use my powers of observation on something more useful than spotting blokes wearing inappropriate attire, I took time to consider my three travelling companions - Katie, Henry, and Oscar. We’d been through a lot in the preceding nine months, and even though we’d spent nearly every waking hour together, sometimes it’s in those dead moments when you really notice things.
16 September 2019, O’Hare Airport, Gate K12
It has happened. We’ve squandered a perfectly good 8-½ months and are now sitting in the airport waiting to board the first of three flights going home to Australia. Home, sort of. All we’ve really got there is a Toyota Prado and a storage container full of a drum kit and who knows what else. I guess that makes it home, sort of? And squandered might be a bit strong. A lot strong, really. We’ve seen so much, visited so many good people, had such a time that I suppose I am just upset it has gone so fast. I told Katie as much the other night, and she agreed.
We’re sitting almost exactly where we sat in January when we waited to board a plane to Miami and then one onto Buenos Aires. But so much has changed since then.
Henry’s sitting next to me. He’s now 13, and easily taller than his mom, which isn’t saying a lot because Katie’s short, but he’s our baby boy. His voice in kinda fucked up - is it changing or is he not drinking enough water? Could be either. His hair is short and fuzzy, but that goes for all of us since we cut our hair off in Oregon in support of our friend Laurel. He’s got a dirty half-stache and kinda looks oily a lot of the time. He’s growing up…
Oscar’s to his left. He’s still the same loveable size, and I hope he stays that way forever. But he’s now smarter, more articulate, asking questions of his grandmother like, ‘And what made you select that book to read?’. He’s also become a keen observer of the world, and with all that he’s come across so far this year, I cannot imagine what goes on in his 11-year old head. In a good way.
Katie’s across from me. She was, anyways. She looks good in her short, salt and peppery hair, but I don’t like it. Reminds me too much of my Aunt Pat, who’s got the same shape head and has always had real short hair and is a bit intense. Katie’s lost weight through all the walking about we’ve been doing. We’ve got a bit more open dialogue going on, with each of us expressing anger or frustration with the other person, though mostly without having it turn into a big mess. That’s good, honesty’s good, though we could still do better. We work well together, sometimes it amazes me how well, with her rolling up the tent and me loading the car; her packing our 8 fucking bags while I worked on selling our shit. We’re a good team.
I should stop here to provide you with a travel recommendation: Don’t disrespect your luggage. In retrospect, I’m unsure why I found the need to do so while sitting there at Gate K12, and ultimately I think it came back to haunt us, some sort of bag karma at work. When we landed in Sydney, the muggy heat of the Iowan summer had been replaced with chilly temperatures, clouds so low it felt like you could touch them, and persistent rain. While sitting and waiting to exit the plane, we spotted our suitcases out the window stacked with a hundred others, helplessly getting soaked.
The airline was quick about the business of unloading our bags from the plane, but did not show the same urgency in getting the fucking things inside and out of the rain.
We had just shy of two weeks in Melbourne to get re-acclimated to the other side of the world, and to get ready to leave again. We obviously did not live in Melbourne, hadn’t since the previous December, so would be imposing our bag-life on the beds, floors and couches of friends.
There was a lot of preparation to do, not to mention finalising where it was that we were actually going to go. I’d scribbled some things on paper and had a general goal of blazing north so we could get to the start of the Gibb River Road as quickly as possible.
The Gibb River Road - The Gibb - is an almost mythical unpaved track that cuts across the most northwest section of Australia, an area called the Kimberley. It’s populated by more freshwater crocs and emus than people, a landscape of deep red and brown bluffs cut by rivers, waterfalls, and secret water holes. The cattle stations and roadhouses of the Gibb are legendary amongst travellers.
But the Gibb was subject to closures when there was too much water, making the road impassible, and the cattle stations closed if there wasn’t enough water, slowing the majestic waterfalls to a trickle. And they all closed almost regardless around the beginning of November, when the wet season would begin and the heat made things unbearable. We were planning to leave Melbourne on October 1, and I’d planned an aggressive stretch of driving in order to get to the Gibb before everything shut down.
Melbourne ended up a whirlwind, one that exposed the fact that maybe we didn’t really know what we were doing when it came to travelling in the Outback or using the camper trailer that we were borrowing. Luckily we had a lot of help from our friends.
The ten days of Melbourne was only covered by a single journal entry, so it’s a long one. I’ve split it up so I can throw in my two cents every so often.
1 October 2019, Melbourne
Day 1
It’s not really day 1, but we’ve just hit the road after being in Melbourne for a week and a half. It’s been stressful. Our flights back were fine, though we missed one in Sydney and all our bags sat on the tarmac in the pissing Sydney rain, making all our stuff wet.And you can add smuggler to my list of many accomplishments. When we were in Colorado Springs, I bought 124 dollars worth of edibles, and mixed them with chewy jolly ranchers for the trip back. I was kinda nervous, Katie was very nervous, but nothing happened. $124 worth of edibles - 40 chewy bits - is apparently not a high priority for security folks, who are more concerned with shoes and bombs disguised as water bottles.
Then jet lag set in, and it was crippling. I came down with a cold at the same time, which only magnified the effects. I was hating existence. Felt like a zombie. The rest of the family got hit hard too, but none of them got sick. I even cancelled a catch up with Craig because I was too beat up.
It was good to see our friends, it seemed like we’d just left. And they were all so generous. Asia and Sebastian let us stay at their house, taking over half of it, and use their car and parking pass so we could park our car in their neighbourhood. We also stayed at Joe and Hennika’s for several days, upsetting their controlled and clean routines with our chaos and television watching. Joe updated my WikiCamps app with all the highlights we’d need to check out on our way, essentially planning the trip for us. They let us eat all their food and use all their stuff because ours was in storage.
And Dan and Janine were selfless with their time. They’ve loaned us their camper trailer, and it needed to be serviced at a suburb called Carrum Downs, which is miles from anything. Dan drove the trailer down, then jumped through hoops with the guy there to get it all fixed in a timely manner. Ultimately D&J wanted to make sure it was working properly for our trip.
They also spent half a day on two separate occasions to show us around the thing. It’s a monster, with all sorts of bells and whistles, tips and tricks, quirks. One of the days we spent 3 hours at a park in the freezing cold setting the trailer up, with Dan watching and giving us tips. D&J are too much. As we dropped Dan off at his house in the dark, Janine came out to meet us and say goodbye. They were excited for us. We were nervous. Dan had one last thing to say before we left.
‘I’m expecting stuff to get broken. It can be fixed. If it gets totaled or stolen, it’s insured - don’t worry about it! Just have a good time.’
And how can I forget Russell, who stored our Prado for us since we left?
Our trip may have gone much differently if it hadn’t been for Russell Bates.
I’d met him a few years prior in the office where I’d worked as a project manager, and even in an office of alpha dudes and power chicks, Russell still managed to stand out. Tall and lean, with a gray handlebar mustache, he had a big voice to match his personality. He looked out of sorts in the appropriate office attire of chinos and a button down shirt, very out of place when the situation required a suit, but he nearly always had on worn dusty brown boots that gave a hint of his past life as a builder, and current life as the owner and operator of a horse farm.
I hardly ever saw Russell sitting down. Instead he’d be holding court somewhere. In the common room, he’d banter with the blokes about footy or politics while flipping through the Australian Financial Review. Back in the far corner of our office, the section dedicated to the construction arm of the business that he ran, Russell would offer advice to any and all of his charges that would need it, even at times when they didn’t know they did or didn’t want it, in his fatherly and gruff way. He’d built everything, if you believed the stories, and worked with or for everyone in the city. When I left the company, Russell’s talents were going toward building industrial greenhouses for companies that grow medicinal marijuana.
A number of times he had pulled me aside, looking at me direct and serious, before speaking in a tone a couple of levels down from his usual bluster, one that made you think he was letting you in on a secret. What came out was usually some piece of advice about how to manage something, or a nugget of construction wisdom.
‘These marijuana guys, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing,’ he confided in me once, then went on to explain how weed should be properly grown.
I’d always thought his brown boots would be better paired with a wide cowboy hat, blue jeans, and a sheriffs badge, because he seemed to be forever moseying around the office, keeping people in line and dispensing knowledge to whomever needed tending.
Not long after we arrived back in Melbourne, Katie and I borrowed a car and drove the hour or so from the city to Russell’s farm. He’d kindly agreed to let us store our car there until we returned to Australia. While we were away, he had dutifully run our car every so often, and charged the battery when it was slow to start. We’d found it sitting underneath an awning outside a large metal shed, something that could pass for a small aircraft hanger.
Inside the shed was a workshop like nothing I’d ever seen. There were rows of tall shelves filled with tools of every shape and variety. Beyond those were equally tall shelves stocked with miscellaneous supplies like air filters, duct tape, and lube. There was one four-wheel drive ute - as the Aussies like to call a truck - up in the air on a lift, so you could walk underneath and really get at things. Another ute sat in the corner.
“That one’s an 80-series,” he told us, pointing to the Toyota Landcruiser in the corner. “I’ve had other ones, but I think they’re the best. Yours will be just fine, too” he added, opening up the back of the ute to show off the wooden shelving, drawers, and compartments built into the back.
And there was also a forklift, a tractor, and a boat.
Russell is an experienced off road driver and camper, and he knew of our plans to be in some fairly rugged Outback areas.
When we went to pick our car up, on a cold and rainy day a few days after we’d arrived, we started off by talking about his health, poor guy had pneumonia for a while but didn’t know it. Then we got into his shed, where this conversation began:
Russell: Have you got snatch straps?
Me: No
Have you got tools?
No
Have you got a tyre plug kit?
No
Have you got a shovel? A spare fuel filter? Spare tubes?
A fly screen installed behind your grille so tumbleweed that gets caught there doesn’t catch fire?
Maxtrax? Duct tape? Shade cloth to lay on the ground? WD-40?
With each ‘No, I don’t have socket wrenches’, or ‘No, I haven’t thought about carrying a personal locator beacon’, the questions only picked up pace. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, as the saying goes, and Russell owned an acreage so he could have more space for his stories.
He could tell that we were a couple of Sunday drivers, and took it as his responsibility to make sure we didn’t end up as four bleached skeletons lying under a gum tree somewhere, the blackened shell of our car nearby. Scrawled on the trunk of the tree could be found the words ‘Don’t forget to protect the engine block from burning bushes…’
I could tell Russell thought that we are all gonna die.
Make sure you look under the bonnet every morning, he told me.
Always check your tyre pressures when driving on gravel and sand.
Watch out for bulldust.
Come down later if you want to build a storage area in the back of your car, I’ve got all the tools and materials you’ll need, he offered.
We came away with a pile of tools and supplies in the back of our car, along with a stack of road atlases pulled from one of Russell’s many shelves, each item with the name ‘Bates’ written on it in marker, save for one thing: As we were about to leave, he scrounged through a bin and pulled out a rusty nail. Taking it over to an angle grinder, he quickly cut the sharp end off.
“Keep this for when you need to lower your tyres. Whole lot easier than using your finger,” he said, with a glimmer in his eye. The nail was ours to keep.
And yet, for all of Russell’s help that day, we came away feeling less ready than we had upon arriving, beyond just not ready, utterly unprepared. Between the fear I had of driving on outback roads, and the seeming complexity of Dan’s super camper trailer, both Katie and I couldn’t help but feel an impending sense of failure coming as we drive north out of Melbourne.
Katie left Russell’s scared. I was thinking, we’re doomed!
Eventually there wasn’t anything left to do in Melbourne and no more excuses, so we left.
When it came time to finally leave, I had to physically drag Oscar out of Joe and Hennika’s house, and Henry grumbled all day.
‘The reason I’m so grumpy is that we’re going to the middle of nowhere, there will be nothing to see, nothing to do!’
We’ll see about that.
As much noise as was going on in my head about all the unknowns and potential sources of death and destruction that we might encounter, it still felt good to have broken free from limbo, to actually be going somewhere. And that somewhere was our very first stop, the little town of Mildura that sits on the banks of the mighty Murray River.
I’ll write again soon!