Come for the toilet block, stay for the jumping pillow

Letter #3 - Mildura to Broken Hill

Welcome back to Letters From the Road, and letter #3!

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.

You’ve not missed much! Need to catch up on the first letters? The first one is here, and second one is stashed under the seat in front of you here. Really like to do your background research? There’s a bit more about the trip and Letters From the Road here.

Thanks so much for reading. I’m excited to have you here, and I hope you stick around to enjoy many more.

Luke

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After setting up camp and eating dinner in the dark the night before, we decided to spend the next day in Mildura, a town on the Murray River straddling the states of Victoria and New South Wales. Only 1 day in to our road trip, and we needed a break. My plan of blazing a trail northward to the Gibb River Road was already starting to look questionable.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

2 October 2019 - Mildura, Victoria

I’m sitting here with Oscar on the north bank of the mighty Murray, watching the remnants of the sunset. We’re on the New South Wales side of the river, looking over at the lights of Mildura in Victoria. I can hear the sounds of traffic on the bridge somewhere behind me, the honks of boats on the river, and the faint sounds of someone singing country music somewhere in the caravan park. 

Day 2 and we stayed put. We messed around with the tent, still getting our bearings about how everything fits together. Oscar pulled out his map of Australia and started logging places he’s been, and places where we’re going. It’s nice that one of the boys finallly takes an interest in what we are going to be doing! Doesn’t often happen.

We went shopping for more stuff: car parts mainly, a couple fishing poles for the boys, along with an extraordinary amount of surplus dry goods that Katie thought it’d be a good idea to carry. At one point I could help but think, ‘don’t we have enough stuff? Do we really need another bottle of sealant? Aren’t we ready?’ Maybe we are.

We actually cooked dinner tonight, last night’s being freeze-dried curry. Tonight was broccolini and lamb on the grill, along with some tomato that we bought from some white haired old timer who was driving around the caravan park in his van and yelling out the window. He told me that he’s working on his anxiety. Happens to the best of us - I’m anxious about getting further down the road tomorrow. 

The country music continues in the distance. There’s a big music festival this week in Mildura, and apparently the people playing music at the caravan park are those that couldn’t make it into the festival. That’s pretty apparent. It sounds kinda like karaoke. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer just came on. A couple of the campers then took matters into their own hands, brought their guitars up to the campground kitchen, and are cranking out some really good covers - a little Neil Diamond and CCR amongst them. 

Katie is on her way back to camp from the toilets and said she stopped to listen, and that the music is making her feel better after pooping her pants.

Doesn’t take much, does it?

I do not recall what made Katie poop her pants. Maybe we should not have purchased tomatoes from the guy in the van, or should have washed them better - you never know where they’d been. 

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Tomato vans and the like are par for the course when staying at caravan parks. I usually tried to avoid this form of accommodation, as I see caravan parks as charmless wimpy half camping. Who needs flushing toilets, electrical hookups or mediocre putt putt golf? So while staying in one on our very first night seemed like a tiny failure, this would certainly not be the last one we’d find ourselves in. 

Let me describe caravan parks, in case you’ve never been to one. They are like refugee camps for people with gray hair, somewhere they stay when they’ve been forced to flee their homes from the ravages of cold weather.

You could also view caravan parks as similar to camping in someone’s backyard. It’s camping, with better amenities. There are flushing toilets and showers found in a ‘toilet block’, which sounds like something out of a prison but sometimes exceeds expectations, and underwhelming open air kitchens. The kitchens usually have not much more than a hotplate, electric kettle, and a toaster, and are stocked with old spatulas that someone abandoned there, a dusty pepper shaker (no salt), and a bottle of cooking oil of unknown provenance. There’s always cooking oil, if you’re in a pinch, but I’d recommend using things found in the camp kitchen at your own risk. 

Caravan parks offer entertainment too, to distract you from nature. Some have the aforementioned putt putt, or a game room, or even a swimming pool. By far the best recreational extra found at caravan parks, however, are jumping pillows. Loved by children across Australia, a jumping pillow is like an upsidedown trampoline. Picture this: put your trampoline flat on the ground, seal the edges, then pump it up with air like a balloon. That’s a jumping pillow: part bouncy castle, part trampoline, and 100% dangerous fun. They are the perfect recreation for road trips, because the prospect of sitting in the car for extended periods seems agreeable due to all of your miscellaneous minor injuries. 

A jumping pillow, owned by a pig.

One common characteristic amongst caravan parks is the landscape. They are typically flat and open, allowing for easy parking of a large and confusing array of camping vehicles. A good number of these vehicles are, in fact, called ‘caravans’, thus the name caravan park in the first place. Caravans are what Australians call a tiny house that you pull behind your car or ute. Caravans often come with names like The Manta Ray, Freedom, or Sunwagon, names which are meant to be aspirational, helping you envision all the possibilities of life drug behind your car. When you buy a black-coloured caravan, the names are a bit edgier, like The Razor, Dirty Harry or Fraser. I like the idea of having a trailer called Dirty Harry even though it has little to do with camping, because it might make dodgy tomato sellers think twice before knocking on my door. I can’t imagine buying a caravan called Fraser - that’s just plain odd, like naming your dog Bill. 

Campervans are different from caravans, being vans where you sleep in the back. That could be any van, I suppose. If you sleep, eat and keep a few odd pieces of clothing and a frisbee in your van, you’re said to be living the ‘van life’. People living the van life can sometimes be found in caravan parks, but it's very hush hush because they don’t post on Instagram about it.

More commonly found in caravan parks are motorhomes, which you might recognise as RVs if you live in North America. These range in size from large vans through to real behemoths, like shipping containers with wheels and windows and satellite TV. I’ve been in some that are nicer than the townhouse where we currently live.  

We had something different altogether - a camper trailer - which made us a bit of an oddity, but everyone was nonetheless friendly and was happy enough to sell us vegetables and let us listen to their nightly music. 

Many of the caravans, motorhomes, and even some campervans, have built in toilets, which can come in handy when you are trying to keep from pooping your pants, since you’ve always got facilities on hand. 

The caravan park we stayed at in Mildura was not bad as far these places go. It was green and grassy, and there were lots of tall red gum trees around the place. The best part was that it was situated on the banks of the Murray River, the longest river in Australia. It’s Australia’s version of the Mississippi or Danube. 

As with many things in Australia, the Murray is named after some British bloke, in this case Sir George Murray, who had the lofty title of Secretary of State for War and Colonies when the river was stumbled across by an explorer named Captain Charles Sturt. Sir Murray had a pretty good run in terms of having random things named in his honour, as there’s another Murray River in Western Australia, as well as the unimpressive 780-metre (2,500 feet) high Mount Murray, not to mention a public building in Hong Kong. 

However, the Murray River was famously named two different things by two different people. There was Captain Sturt and the Murray, with Sturt coming across the river in 1830. A guy named Hamilton Hume actually beat Sturt to the punch, encountering the river at a different spot in 1824. Hume creatively named the river the Hume River for his father, but Sir George Murray’s zest for rivers (and his big-cheese spot in the government) won the day, and so it is the Murray River.

Except, that is, in South Australia, where they call it the River Murray for some reason. Probably just to spite their neighbours in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. 

Incidentally, Hume and Sturt both ended up with the high honour of having highways named after them. Which just proves the point that if you were an even remotely competent British white guy in Australia in the 1800’s and not a convict, you’d have a pretty good chance of having some random tributary or alley named after you.

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It was not lost on me, as Oscar and I sat on our bench on the green lawn, looking out at the longest river in Australia flowing past, that we were headed to some of the driest parts of Australia. And Australia’s the driest continent on earth outside of our neighbour to the south, Antarctica. Maybe that’s reason enough to stay in Mildura an extra day?

We fell asleep that night to the sounds of the music drifting to us from the camp kitchen. I cannot remember exactly what was playing, but it was probably Crowded House. In Australia, you can always count on Crowded House. And on a road trip you can always count on the magnetic pull of the car. As much as you hate it after a long day, and the way it smells of sweat and coffee and children, it will always draw you back the next day, like a tough relationship or that one last beer after a long night. Just one more. You’re almost there. 

The road ahead.

The next day our tiny interlude would be over, and we would head north again to Broken Hill - a place on the edge of nowhere.