On the road with Joe

Caravanning families must share a sixth sense – how else could Lisa, Greg and Joe cross paths with the Smeads in three states?

The caravan park was pleasant enough. The staff was efficient, the lawns clipped and the bathrooms would have passed scrutiny from Greg’s mother, a retired hospital matron. But that was the problem – it was too orderly and there were too many rules. Suddenly our big Australian adventure felt more like a package deal to the suburbs.

One afternoon I wandered over to the laundry to be confronted by a bizarre sight. “Greg,” I screeched running back to the van, “we have to leave! There is a woman in there ironing her linen.”

In that moment, Greg and I vowed to do more bush camping and to spend less time in corporate caravan parks, like this one, outside Cairns. That evening, as we sat outside planning our escape, a white 4WD pulled up beside us.

“Excuse me,” said the bloke in the driver’s seat. “Are you the people who write for Open Road?” He had spotted the Volvo, the Jayco Expanda and the high chair. “Figured it must be you.”

Tim Smead and his wife Kate had left their home in Port Macquarie six weeks earlier and were also travelling in a 16-foot Expanda. The difference between us: we had one child in tow, they had four. Their youngest, Georgia, was the same age as our Joe.

We peppered the Smeads with questions about how they managed. “A logistical miracle,” declared Greg as he checked out their van. They only had one grown-up’s chair – there was no chance they would be relaxing together.

It was a brief encounter. We shared a meal and a bottle of wine and, in the morning, said our goodbyes. We were heading for Cape York and they were driving west to Alice Springs. We figured we would never see them again.

But six weeks later our paths crossed again. The Smeads were leaving Alice Springs as we arrived. During our ten-minute reunion they told us they’d written off their caravan in western Queensland near the Lawn Hill National Park. The van jack-knifed in a gully after a rock had sliced through the brake cable.

They had managed to limp into Mount Isa and spent weeks organising insurance money, finding and buying a new van and getting it and themselves to Alice Springs. They were finally ready to move on. “Catchya in the Kimberley, perhaps,” we said waving farewell.

When we made it to the Kimberley there was no sign of the Smeads. We spent months in the area awed by the scale and grandeur and remoteness of it all. We did a lot of walking, often through ancient red rock gorges lined with lush green ferns. It was almost as though Russell Crowe’s Rabbitohs had sponsored the landscape.

From Broome we did the long haul south, stopping to admire wildflowers and to camp beside turquoise-coloured bays. One afternoon we pulled into a beach-front park in Esperance, in the south east of the state. We had been there half an hour when a man approached us. “G’day journalists,” he said. It had been many thousands of kilometres since we’d seen Tim Smead so it took us a moment to recognise him. The Smeads were camped four vans away. What were the chances?

The Smeads, we came to learn, were much more organised than us. We never knew one day to the next where we were going to be staying and, at least once a month, we set off on an epic expedition only to realise, 30km out of town, that we had forgotten to fuel up. The Smeads made plans. Greg reckoned they probably had survival kits, MRE’s (meals ready to eat) and gallons of spare fuel. Tim had done the Duke of Edinburgh and knew knots – he could probably orienteer his way out of trouble. It seemed only sensible that we should team up for the great Nullabor crossing.

We set off: two caravans, four adults, five kids and a lot of chocolate. The Smeads had a plan to feed their kids one small chocolate for every half hour on the road. To Joe, who had known only sultanas as a treat, this was a revelation. “Choc, choc,” he now demands, his hand out like a mafia boss insisting on his cut.

We were glad to be travelling with another family. After so long on the road, taking on the Nullabor felt like something to be endured rather than enjoyed. But the trip was a pleasant surprise. We moved into the lovely meditative zone that can come with a long journey and no mobile phone coverage. There had been rain and so the spindly eucalypts that line the road in many places looked sprightly and there were flowers. The Nullabor was spruced.

“I read that in Greenland there are a thousand words for snow,” said Greg as we chatted about the colours. “I reckon in Australia we should have a thousand words for green.”

Towards the end of the second day, the Smeads went on ahead and we agreed to meet at a place called Eucla.

“There may be more than one caravan park at Eucla,” Tim said.

“Well we’ve found each other in three different states; I reckon we can probably find each other in Eucla,” replied Greg.

Eucla, it turned out, consisted of a single caravan park, high on a cliff, with a magnificent view of the ocean and not much else. We fed the kids, bathed them in big buckets and put them to bed.

Then we talked into the night about life’s great issues. Perhaps it’s those big open spaces that fill your head with grand ideas about where you sit in the universe. Or perhaps it was just the booze.

Open Road January/February 2009