G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 48. This one comes to you from the Big Valley Campground in Margaret River, where we go sighteseeing to check out a chocolate factory, a library, and a phone booth.
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife and two boys back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 47 letters here, drowning in chocolate.
Hooroo!
Luke
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. - Ferris Bueller
A long road trip is an exercise in perspective. Time and space changes, and shifts perspectives. Fast travel and slow living. A focus on the task at hand and the road ahead versus the minute details of what’s around you.
It’s like being on a train speeding across the countryside, the landscape blurred outside the window. Then you step off onto the platform and take in your new surroundings for the first time.
This is something we dealt with all of the time on the road, without even noticing it most of the time. It often occurred when we transitioned from the sometimes frantic and involved days of setting up camp, packing up, and being on the road, to settling in to someplace for several nights when there was no pressure to keep moving.
Our arrival at the Big Valley camp must have represented one of these shifts. My journals from this time are full, meaning I must have had lots of time to think. They are packed with observations, which you would know is normal if you have read any of my other letters, but these ones are slightly different.
They include more than normal that are about my boys Henry and Oscar.
10th December 2019 - Big Valley
Went running this afternoon with Henry. 5km of ‘rawking’ he called it: running and walking. We broke no records, but had fun. Gorgeous sun with some clouds, lots of big trees.
‘It’s comforting to see the trees again,’ he said.
Henry reminded me that it had been a long time since trees. We’d only recently emerged from months out beyond the black stump, in the bush. ‘Bush’ is a general term meaning the uncivilised parts of the country, somewhere out in nature. That could be the mountains, could be the desert, but in our case the literal sense was apt.
The bush where we’d been was one of small scrubby bushes and stunted trees poking out of the rocks and sand. We had now travelled far enough south in Australia to have come once again to a proper forest, thick with tall trees, gums and melaleuca and ironbark. I’ve written before about how much I like trees, and I agreed with Henry that it was comforting to be amongst them again.
We talked about his body, the aches and pains he has in his ankles and knees. Not surprising considering the massive growth spurt he’s gone through over the past year. His body is trying to catch up.
It was only a few months ago that we realised that Henry had grown taller than Katie. Though surely he crept up on her over the course of months, he had been growing so fast it seemed to have happened overnight. I still had a couple of inches on him, but it would not likely be long before he eclipsed me as well.
We also talked about Machu Picchu, how Henry thinks he was at his peak of fitness right then.
Seven months earlier we hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. It was a four day trek, over three mountain passes at high elevations of up to 4,200 metres (13,779 feet). Oscar, good walker though he is, took some coaxing at times. To be fair, I think a lot of people questioned their life choices on the second day of the trek, which included a several hour slog through wind and rain up to Dead Woman’s Pass, the highest point on the trail.
Henry, however, needed none of that. Each day he had been well at the front of our group, navigating the trail by himself through all sorts of weather with a smile on his face.
He had really started to come into his own physically during that part of our trip, gaining lots of confidence. Running was not amongst his bag of tricks yet, though I had no doubt that it could be.
Later I told him that this is how it starts: you run and walk your way through 5km, then you try and run the whole thing, then when that gets breezy, you decide to try 10km, and on it goes. I hope this is how it starts for him…
12th December 2019 - Big Valley
Not sure what’s on today. Dickheads near us were up talking until 3am, as were the birds chirping right outside our window.
Oscar had not experienced the same physical changes as Henry, but there was one area that he easily outpaced his older brother. He read books at a furious pace.
A love of reading is something I always wanted for my kids, and hoped they would foster. But you really don’t know who your kids are going to be, what they will love and get joy from. So all you can do is to expose them to different things, hope for the best, and see what sticks.
You can sign them up for the soccer team, but they might shrug it off as a waste of time like my boys did. My parents sent me to a catholic school and took me to church every Sunday, but I still ended up a heathen.
Katie and I had been reading to the boys nearly every night since they were young, but who could tell whether that would translate into a love of books. It certainly had with Oscar, which makes me very happy.
When I last did an Oscar book check in*, it was almost a month ago and he was on 13 read. Since then he’s finished Oceans 11, the James Bond book ‘Man With the Golden Gun’ (this doubles as sex ed, or more likely sexual harassment training) another Theodore Boone book, and four more: Noodle Pie, I Funny, one was Holes, there was the sequel to a book with flies on the cover, and I’m not sure what the other one was.
*That was back in Letter #31, which came to you from Karijini National Park.
So that put him at 21 and counting. He started the Andromeda Strain, but couldn’t get through it. This has created a small issue whereby beneath the seat in front of him in the car he’s got such a large number of books that he’s running out of space for his feet.
Though in true Oscar form, they are nicely stacked and organised.
Doing the math, that’s one book every three days. Put that way, it makes me feel a bit self conscious myself, like I was wasting time. How many books had I read? What the heck had I been doing while Oscar was pouring all of those words into his mind, like fueling a fire?
He read another one today, one of those bloody Goosebumps books. That’s 22.
It’s a good thing, when you can look at what your kids are doing, and those things make you want to do better. Quite amazing really, when your kid is only 11.
Today after breakfast I played two games of Trivial Pursuit against him. I won both times of course, but he’s hooked. He wanted to play again after dinner and proceeded to smash all of us. He filled up his pie pieces, while the rest of us only had 2 or 3.
Located a 5 minute drive up the road from Big Valley is the town of Rosa Brook, population 216. It is home to a volunteer fire station, a community hall, and Darnell’s General Store. Darnell’s is the closest place to where we were staying to go for supplies, so we stopped in to pick up a few things for dinner.
Darnell’s looks like what a general store should look like. It’s a single story building clad in horizontal wood siding, and has a wide covered front porch occupied by a handful of chairs in case you wanted to sit for a spell before going in to do your shopping. Sitting off to one side of the porch is a phone booth.
A large sign along the roof of the porch says the name of the place, and ‘Est 1932’. Inside the store, a long counter dominated the side of the room opposite the door. The wood floors were made of long creaky planks, worn to the colour of sand.
Items were stocked not on metal industrial shelving like at your local super mart, but wood shelves or tables that somehow made the potato chips and such feel a bit more special. Some items like the peanut butter and Weet-Bix were behind the counter, meaning you had to actually speak to a person to get what you wanted.
Right across from the candy section is a piano.
I appreciate places like Darnell’s where you are not pummeled into paralysis by too many choices, where the aisles are like grim valleys that must be traversed to get to where you are going whether you like it or not.
The selection at Darnell’s was not vast, but it was good enough. I liked it immediately, and we came back several times while at Big Valley.
Katie and I spent a moment looking at the notice board at Darnell’s, and a flyer for the Rosa Brook Community Christmas Fair caught our eye. It was going to be held in a few days. This presented an opportunity.
Christmas was coming, and very quickly. We had been struggling to find ways to make things a bit more festive. Being vagabonds made this difficult. You can’t exactly put up a Christmas tree inside your tent. Get-togethers with family were out, aside from getting together with each other which did not feel jolly.
A local community Christmas festival might be a good way to celebrate and give us a bit of local flavour, hanging out with a handful of people from Rosa Brook. The boys, however, were not interested.
They were probably picturing the Gingin Christmas Fair we’d attended two weeks prior, where the highlights were a stand selling tea towels and a couple of llamas dressed up for Christmas in green and red.
The boys also weren’t impressed when we said there would be food and drink because the things that Margaret River is famous for are not their speed. Teenagers would rather have cheeseburgers than charcuterie, chardonnay and a cheeky pale ale.
So we scrapped the Christmas Fair and took them to a chocolate factory.
13th December 2019 - Big Valley
Visit to the Margaret River Chocolate Factory. It’s a tourist jack, to be sure. In the back they’ve got a window where you can watch them make chocolates. There is a cauldron - not a cool looking one - think large stainless steel sink, full of white chocolate and one of dark. The white chocolate cauldron had a wheel in it that kept the chocolate moving. The darker stuff had a faucet which continuously poured out chocolate into the trough.
Where is all that chocolate coming from? Wouldn’t that be a sweet way to die, death by chocolate? The evil villain grabbing your hair and holding your head under the chocolate spout until you drown?
The boys may have volunteered to give it a try had anyone asked.
Tourist jack, trap, or otherwise, there were enough free samples around to keep the boys happy for a little while, until they fell in a post sugar rush heap back at camp.
While they were sluggishly lying around the place, Katie and I were sampling some of the area’s finer things.
I drank too much on this day. One wine, three can-sized beers at Colonial Brewing, and one more when we got home. That’s 5. Why? It was hot. It was Saturday. It felt good (at the time). It was the afternoon. Everyone else whom I could see at the winery and brewery, were doing it.
Good enough reasons?
16 December 2019 - Big Valley
Today I made scrambled eggs for Katie and the boys for breakfast. Henry made bacon on the griddle, Oscar made buttery toast. Great breakfast.We did nothing until after lunch, then drove into Margaret River and sat at the library all day. 4 hours. And everyone was happy. Katie sat and knit, she’s working on a sweater for me. Oscar read and talked to some old lady at the computers and then watched YouTube. Henry downloaded some audio books then did who knows what.
I spent my time writing a story about - of all things - a road trip.
After we got back to camp, there was a lull before dinner where we all did our own thing. And right then, standing next to our tent, my perspective changed yet again. Henry and Oscar had found some matchbox cars and had plopped down in the dusty, patchy grass and began to play.
My kids are playing with cars right now. It makes me happy to see them acting like kids. That seems weird to think about, but it's true.
It was a tiny moment really, just the two of them playing with cars. But all of the sudden they weren’t the guy who was growing so fast his body hurt, or the one who was reading more books than the rest of his family had read in the last 12 months combined, they were just two kids.
Something about that made me stop and take notice, to watch it like it was a moment that might not happen again.