G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 52. In this letter, we’ve finally escaped the gravitational pull of the Big Valley Campsite and turned the corner to drive east again, in the direction of home. But there are dark clouds gathering, and silence.
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 51 letters here, listening to Simon & Garfunkel.
Be well,
Luke
Regret and hangovers go hand in hand. Neither was conducive for an early morning departure from the Big Valley Campsite.
Katie and I had been up until at least 1 am the night before, sitting around one of the big wooden tables in the open air camp kitchen, drinking wine and talking with our neighbours about ourselves, life, and about buying stuff we don’t need from Op Shops. It had been fun, but today it was time to move on.
18 December 2019 - Big Valley Campsite
Katie and I grimly put aside too little sleep and groggy hangovers and packed the camp up. Katie was in worse shape than me.
We drove south toward the coast on Highway 1, the Southwestern Highway, through the thick forests of Mount Frankland National Park. The road eventually turned to the east as we approached the coast, in the direction of the town of Walpole.
At one point during our drive today, somewhere deep in the woods outside Walpole, we stopped for a toilet break and I think Katie vomited next to the trailer.
I pondered doing the same. It might have been carsickness. It might have been regret.
On my mind while we drove was a guy that I met just as we were leaving Big Valley. His name is Robert, and Katie met him the day before when I had been out fishing with the boys. Robert called himself ‘the Bear’, possibly because he was from California where there is a bear on the state flag, or possibly because he was a big round guy, who kind of resembled a bear lumbering about. He moved to Australia from California in the 70’s, and never went back.
He came by our camp as Katie and I were struggling to take down and put away our awning, timing that’s inconvenient. I may have been rude to him, projecting my frustration from the physical gymnastics that the awning required coupled with a lack of sleep. So I went to see him at his camp before we left. He drove a little truck with a topper on the back, and the rear was set up as a cozy space for sleeping and living.
Robert seems like an interesting dude. He was a boat builder, and between that, a keen interest in lighthouses, and a mention that he had bowel and prostate cancer and was given 5 years to live at one point, he seems to be a character that would have a few stories.
‘The doctor told me I had five years to live, so I should just go out and have fun, and that was 13 years ago!’
The Bear also liked to take photographs, and he delighted in giving me a full show of the ones he’d been taking while travelling, something which delayed our departure by at least a half an hour.
I told him to look me up if his travels ever took him to Melbourne. Instead of just telling me his phone number, he gave me a blown up color print of a photo he’d taken that had his name and phone number written on the back. It was better than any business card I’d ever received.
We drove all afternoon and ended up at a place with an awkward name called Ayr Something-or-other. It occupied a piece of ground behind a farm that sat on a hill near the road. All sites were situated in an oblong circle around two bland buildings, a kitchen and a toilet block. There were three camps set up amongst the 30 odd sites, and not a soul to be seen nor heard from.
Two caravans sat under trees, and cars were parked nearby so someone was likely home, but they did not stir. Satellite dishes propped near each one suggested that the occupants were inside watching TV. Perhaps the 5 day cricket test between Australia and New Zealand that Dave, one of our neighbours at Big Valley, was watching a few days ago was still miserably dragging on.
No one even in the Reception office, which was locked up tight and looked dusty and near abandoned behind the sliding glass window, save for a handful of brochures on a rack. A further handful of brochures, something from the National Park to do with a place called Greens Pool, sat in a pile that was sticking out from under the doormat.
An ice cream freezer sat off to one side, unplugged, unused, and sad. I don’t think I’ve ever seen sadder ice cream. A short table sat on the other side of the door, with a clipboard and instructions to write your name and how many nights you wanted to stay, and then instructions on how to bank transfer the camping fees. There was no mention of what those fees are.
It was peaceful, eerily so, in the 5pm light, but this was not the place for us.
We moved on down the road to a beachfront campground called Parry Beach that we hoped might have space. It did - we got the last one.
The Parry Beach Campground is a 10 minute drive from the main highway through low coastal scrub, and you know you’ve arrived when you can drive no further - the road deadends at the beach.
There’s a small yellow cottage at the end of the road that houses the caretakers, who are typically volunteers from the local community. It could be a nice gig, I thought to myself, getting to stay for free in a house overlooking a lovely stretch of ocean, if it weren’t for the campers.
Technically the road didn’t end there, as you can drive down onto the beach and continue north for several kilometres along the white sand around the curving William Bay. Many people did this, though I suspected that most did so because they could, out of the novelty of the endeavour rather than because of any necessity.
The campsites were located back in amongst the scrub, with short peppermint trees providing cool shade over the entire campground and creating a feeling of tranquility. This despite the fact that the campground was packed and groups of kids swarmed the place on foot and by bicycle.
After we arrived, the weather turned. The temperature changed and dark clouds moved in to settle over the coast.
19th December 2019 - Parry’s Beach
Decidedly not a beach day. Not that anyone in this group cares. When the rain and wind started, it snapped everyone out of their stupors for a moment as we rallied to put up the awning so we had a little shelter.
‘Hello darkness, my old friend,’ Oscar sang as the clouds rolled through.
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
We were all feeling off from the moment we arrived at Parry’s Beach, and I think it went beyond a change in the weather and being hungover. For the rest of the day, aside from the patter of the rain on our tent, there was silence, when we weren’t arguing.
The other night Henry called Katie a hypocrite. I can’t remember why. They got into a big argument.
Last night Henry was whinging on and on about having to wash three of the four plates after dinner. I told him to quit, Katie told him to quit, eventually I got frustrated and gave him a ‘poor poor Henry, had to wash an extra plate...’ and he lost it, knocking a cup off the table, looking steamed.
We all apologised.
Katie has basically sat in the tent all day. Clearly there’s something wrong, but who knows what it is? She didn’t acknowledge my dinner or the fire I started or the fact that I’ve looked after the boys pretty much all day, drove all day yesterday and looked after them - including going fishing, the bane of my existence - all day the day before.
Even chili with lots of veg could not melt the ice
Earlier in our trip, I had lamented the grind of constantly moving. “Is this whole 3 months going to feel like work?” I wrote in my journal when we were in Wilpena Pound back on day 5. At the time, it seemed like the potential joy of the trip was sullied when a good chunk of each day consisted of tearing down camp, driving, and setting up again at night.
But now I’m not so sure it is that simple. A few months earlier, we’d completed a trek through the Andes along the Inca Trail. It was four days of particularly hard walking, most of it at high altitude. The routine of waking up, walking, pausing for regular meals and breaks, stopping at the end of the day, and then doing it all again the next day and the next, was not a grind - it felt good.
Even if it is hard, and your legs hurt, you cannot help but get into a groove, always moving forward like you’re a train on rails. I think the mind and body find comfort in the repetition.
During our road trip, long stops along the way, like the eight days we’d just spent at Big Valley, upset that routine. They feel good at the time, like a long night of drinking with friends - which Big Valley began to feel like towards the end - but you pay for it later.
After eight days there getting comfortable, the pack up and long drive, the nervous search for a camp spot we hadn’t booked, and then another camp setup, felt tedious and we were all grumpier for it.
This is not to say that the answer is to organise your road trip as a series of one night stands, as you could call them, but there’s a balance between that and longer stays.
Even after months on the road, we had not figured that balance out yet.
During pauses in the rain, Henry and Oscar explored the campground. There were lots of kids around, and our boys were undertaking the important reconnaissance to see how old the kids were, whether they were bikers or cricketers or fishermen, and whether any of them had access to the internet - the important things.
During a break in the action, Oscar was chasing rabbits around our campsite. He did not see a low wire fence that was almost invisible in the gloom. One second he was running straight ahead, the next he was flat on his face.
Luckily the ground was soft and sandy, and he escaped relatively unscathed except for his embarrassment.
Later we were alone and talking. He asked me if I had ever looked back on my life and thought about what it would be like if I had done something differently.
‘Yes,’ I said, without going into detail. ‘You?’
He thought hard. I thought he might be thinking about the incident with the rabbit and the fence. ‘Yes, I’ve often thought about things I do in my kid-ishness. I’m kind of a snitch,’ he says.
Why is that a problem? I asked him.
Other kids don’t like it, he told me.
Well, I guess there’s a time and place for everything, I said. Sometimes maybe telling on someone is unnecessary and you can handle things yourself. Sometimes it may be out of your hands and you need some help from a teacher or a parent. That’s nothing to be worried about, nothing to regret.
He seemed satisfied with this.
Maybe we were all being a bit kid-ish for the last two days, letting ourselves take out our frustrations and fatigue on others. We did not have much time left in our trip, and I did not want the memory of our last two weeks to be of us bickering and resenting each other.
We don’t want to be left with regrets. Or hangovers.
More from Parry Beach in your next letter, where a knight in shining armour saves us from our funk, just in time for Christmas.
OK, I have to admit that I read when I find the time, not fresh off the press editions. But this entry with focus on the people with you, and the honesty of it - so tender, so good!
Also "An ice cream freezer sat off to one side, unplugged, unused, and sad. I don’t think I’ve ever seen sadder ice cream." - ace! Last but not least, the Hakea looks more like an underwater plan than like a flower, still pretty.