Day 86: 13th of September. These little travellers have made it all the way home. Melbourne.

Shortest drive of the tour! An hour and 20 minutes from OG back to the starting point 85 nights later. We went out for dinner with Joel and Alex and walking to the restaurant, it didn’t feel like 3 months since we had seen the view. Time is a funny construct where familiarity can mean 3 months since last being at home didn’t seem that long. The time actually away did seem like a long time. New experiences, new learnings, new activities keeps the brain active as almost everything has to be thought through and there are few automatic reactions. The days seem longer as you are doing more in them. I know from previous trips, that walking back into the office will be familiar and that everyone will be interested, for a bit. The day to day of familiar routine will erode the months of being away quicker than a Byron Bay sand dune. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we need to make sure that there are the new experiences and different things to do to keep the brain ticking and those days longer.

Catching up with friends will be good, and the first trip with the van is locked in. I am going by myself for an overnight stay with a friend in Cressy who only has the one bedroom. Port Fairy music festival is booked with another friend with a similar van and we will be going together. If you were wondering if we would be selling it now we are back, the answer is not until at least Port Fairy.

If the question is “would we do another extended trip with the van?”. The answer is probably not, at least not for quite a while. Did we do the right thing? Absolutely. Would we do it differently with what we know now? Not much. Are we going to miss it? Yes, and no. What was the highlight? In honesty, the trip in itself was the highlight. Sure, floating down hot springs in Bitter Springs and Berry Springs, the boys coming to Darwin, Tim Minchin in Darwin, Icehouse from afar at Uluru, Indian at Banka Banka, the sunsets, the sunrises, the people we met, the shooting stars in Hughenden, the hospitality of friends, the Kings Canyon and Uluru hikes, Helicopter and Canoe rides in Katherine, The Dish and laps around Bathurst were all great, but it wasn’t just one of those. It was all of those at the same time as learning to tow a van, make a camp, how to navigate caravan parks, camp kitchens and lack thereof, showering in tight and revealing places, getting wet, getting hot, getting the awning blown down, making dinner in the rain, eating dinner in the wind were all part of the highlight.

Learning the “How to” was one thing, but we also learnt a lot about our own country. Places we had never heard of, what the distances really feel like, things like the dingo proof fence are still a thing. We also learned a tiny bit about how the indigenous folk live in the outback. How hard it is for them to turn things around. They are already struggling and things like fresh fruit and vegetables are so expensive remotely, it is easier and cheaper to get chips and a coke. We learned how confronting it was to be checked for ID by police before going into a bottle shop and asked if it is for you and where are you going to take it, then have security staff in the shop, and then still have to present ID for scanning when you check out. We learned how at Uluru the Indigenous organisation running it makes it a great visit, and also gives the tradional owners jobs and control over the way the rock continues to exude its immense presence in the desert. We learned (well, I guess we knew) that racism is still rampant with tourists complaining about their car and wallets being stolen “by the locals” when they are left in view with keys in it when you know damn straight the same thing would happen anywhere else.

The goal of the trip was to shake things up from the everyday and create new shared experiences between Linda and I. This we certainly did. We both had a lot of comments from people before we went about how will you stand being so close with your partner for so long, could the relationship survive it? Well, let’s not kid ourselves, it wasn’t a bed of roses all the time. I struggle to put up with myself 24/7 without having to expect someone else to do it! But we knew when to space out, we knew when to patch up and we knew how to work together to make the trip successful. We travelled Europe for 6 weeks before we got married, and that was primarily in a tent. We felt that was a good basis for knowing if we could survive living together. We have now done it for 3 months in a box trailer…..I think we will be OK.

Now, I think I’ll go watch a sunset from my balcony….