Twice now we have stopped for longer periods and stayed with generous friends, once Darwin and now in Broome.
Twice we have spilt from the car, initially with whatever was in hands reach, pillows, keys, books and shoes and then slowly adding more as things are pulled from the trailer. We create little piles of hats, bags, wallets and phones in odd corners of homes, behind doors and under tables. We languish in little luxuries like recharging computers in unused power points behind couches, relishing the speed and potency of mains power.
We have slept in spare rooms, in kid’s rooms, in backyards and in what may be seen as a glorious cliché, on a deck under a giant mango tree in Broome.
We have showered with the frequency of mainstream Australia, pulled cold milk from a fridge whose door isn’t a lid, enjoyed hot water we haven’t boiled ourselves, worn clothes only once before washing again and basked in white, bright light that doesn’t emanate from little torches strapped to the front of our heads.
We have spent time with old friends and reconnected with the tempo of normal life like children going off to school, adults to work, intricate transport logistics of sports, teenagers lazily dropping around during afternoons and the fact there is a difference between a Monday night and a Friday night.
And with this comes a sense off losing some sort of travel fitness, a consciousness that we have become a little stodgy in our movements. When we are on the road, we pack down our little patch of existence every few days, even daily at times, and move on. Soon after we start again somewhere else, another place to learn. We do our diminutive forward-reverse trailer dance at some new site, strategically angling the tent into our preferred spot (with due reverence to the quiet words of my Dad swirling in my head about facing north), and open out into a new space that will be home for another night or two.
It’s not rushed as such – there are times we are left with little to do – but we also have many times when we are deciphering our next move, working on our next shopping list, adding up kilometres until the next fuel station. And of course, we are generally only directly thinking of ourselves, our nomadic group of four and not of whom we might be seeing, where and when.
If anything, humans are great adaptors, evidenced by how we have managed to shape lifestyles in most spots on Earth. From frozen tundras to baking deserts, windswept peaks to unending flatness, cities where we are surrounded by thousands of others to plains where we are surrounded by thousands of kilometres, the planet is divided into billions of places that people call home. It’s wild diversity of what we consider relative normality, an immense miscellany of the immediate sphere of our lives, foreign to those from outside. And yet, we live on.
Of course, adapting to life traveling around the country in a tent is presumably easier than eking out a living as a subsistence farmer in North Korea or negotiating the favelas of Rio. But it is still a daily process of adjustment, as is the existence that we may be tempted to identify as everyday life.
We leave again in a few days, heading down the stretched coast of Western Australia, and farewelling those who have opened their homes and welcomed us. It’ll probably take a few days for that travel vigour to come back as we return to our itinerant normal, but it will.
The biggest adjustment may be when we turn the car off for the final time in the driveway of our home, but that change is for another day.
Big Country 