We now find ourselves just a few days away from hitting the road again for another adventure. Not quite the full lap, but we do have two months of open road, remote national parks and big skies. Up the guts, then across the top and down through Queensland and back home via Port Macquarie at the end of August.
So sadly the Volvo had to go. The kids were pretty upset as we’ve had great memories and trips, but they do already love the Patrol, especially the bouncy suspension and the mid-seat cupholder.
We did a trial pack last week and picked up a couple of extra things - a bigger camp stove, a small card table and another double deluxe self-inflating mattress. But other than that we’re pretty good to go.
So needless to say we’re getting pretty excited. James had has had a cold the last few days so has been off school. We took advantage of a break in the weather yesterday and went for a bush walk down into Onkaparinga Gorge. A taste of national parks and the many many walks ahead….
We'd always talked about doing a big trip with the kids, to share with them the vastness of our country and to build an experience together as a family that would launch a lifelong passion in them for the outdoors life. Things however seemed to be conspiring against us. Until only very recently it felt destined to be one of life's unfulfilled dreams. James starts high school next February and will have lots of transition challenges and activities towards the end of the year. Our window was slowly closing.
I took a break from full time work at the end of March to focus on getting my mojo back after a few tough years, and to enable me to spend some extended post COVID time back with my mum in the UK.
I was initially thinking to take just 3 months off, but these opportunities don’t come up that often and it’s amazing how quickly the calendar fills up. I’m now not sure I can reasonably go back to work until next year. Ness and I started talking about whether we could make something work during my sabbatical, and then in the matter of a rainy bank holiday Monday we'd advertised for house sitters and identified a 4WD.
The next day James and I drove to meet Brett, the owner of the 4WD, at Snowtown - roughly half-way between our place and his on the end of the Yorke peninsula. I don’t really know the first thing about cars, but it started first time and Brett was a really decent guy who had been frustrated by a couple of fraudsters wasting his time on Carsales, After a quick drive around town we shook hands on the deal and Brett delivered our new Patrol to our place a few weeks later while I was in the UK.
She doesn’t have a name from us yet, but she’s a well loved girl with plenty of experience. Brett and his wife were very sad to say goodbye to her - lots of memories from the last 11 years and 260,000kms. She’s been very well looked after and has plenty of surprise customisations and things that will make our trip that little bit more comfortable. There’s pull out drawers and fridge slide in the back, Anderson connection to reduce the chance of the fridge plug bouncing out on corrugations. There’s an AC inverter for small 240v appliances, UHF radio, built in winch and 4WD GPS maps. The only thing we needed to add was a fridge, and we’ve gone with a 40 litre Engel.
We had thought for a moment of taking on the trip in the Volvo. It has the space but when it came down to it there were places we wanted to go that really need a more robust car. Our route planning and camping options have been vastly improved by having the Patrol. Not that we plan on doing massive 4WDing, but there will be plenty of long unsealed corrugated roads and there are some water crossings we need the snorkel for.
The house-sitters are new to Adelaide and love dogs so we know that Scout and Sailor will be in good hands. They arrive on Saturday morning, and then we are off, back on the road, and heading up to our first stop at Mambray Creek in Mount Remarkable National Park. Very excited about what lies ahead …
