Caravan with the fam oz 2010

After 16,000 kilometres, five months and two gas bottle changes, we arrived back home – or very close to home. Our house was still rented out so we backed the caravan into our next door neighbour’s driveway.
The girls had missed family and school friends, but they probably missed next door neighbours Eva and Ruby most of all. Eva was the same age as Skyla, Ruby was the same age as Melody and they were all inseparable when we were home (except for the times they had to be separated). We had tried staying in contact by phone, Skype and email, but none of these were all that effective for the girls so there was huge excitement when the all reunited. Ceridwyn and I were excited to see the parents Joe and Thea but couldn’t quite match the intensity of the children.
We soon got down to business as Thea and Joe had kindly agreed to host Melody’s birthday party the next day. With adults (and a few vaguely helpful children) the preparations went very smoothly. We had plenty of time for chatting and for the first time Ceridwyn got to bed well before 1am on the night before a child’s birthday party.

Unfortunately Melody spent the next few days quite confused. After the emotion of the homecoming on the 22nd , her birthday party on the 23rd, her real birthday on the 24th and then Christmas on the 25th she really didn’t know what day it was. On the 24th we opened a few early Christmas presents and Melody was still waiting for more people to arrive for her party.

The modern trend is to hold children’s birthday at an external venue (indoor playground, Scottish restaurant, water play park, roller rink) and / or spend a lot of money on jumping castles, clowns and costumes. We have remained in the old school of birthday parties at home with traditional games (although have conceded to the modern practice of putting a prize in every layer of the pass the parcel). This time we even bought a piñata rather than spend night after night with balloons, torn up newspaper and murky flour and water. But the same spirit was there, and Ceridwyn was the star, providing storytelling, music and facilitation.

We were back home, surrounded by friends, laughter and a garden that was a lot nicer than ours. We certainly hope that for the girls the trip has made lasting impressions, has opened their eyes to other ways of living, to the vast open spaces in central Australia, the crowded communal chaotic way of life in Bali and much more. We will watch and wait with interest in the coming months as they incorporate fragments and memories of faraway places into their regular life in Geelong.

There wasn't time to reflect on our journey properly, as we still had to return to Melbourne for Christmas (and Skyla's waitressing gig), and organise somewhere to stay for a month until the six month lease of our house expired. But that is a story for another day...

We were due to leave my parents’ on Tuesday, and this was also the day my parents looked after Henry. While we were packing the girls kept Henry highly amused, and for the first time ever Henry refused to go down for his lunchtime nap. We all hopped in the car to show Henry we were leaving, and hoped that might help. The car didn’t start once more and we all hopped out again.

We spent the next evening at Boar Gully Campground in the Brisbane Ranges National Park. The forest always comes alive just after rain – the plants glistened, the smell of eucalyptus was in the air, and bird calls rang out through the clear air. We were impressed with the campground and surrounds, particularly as they were close to our home. The sites were numbered and we noted down two that would work well together for a group gathering (3 and 4)

Wednesday dawned crisp and clear, and it was hard to leave the forest. But there was a birthday party to prepare for, and we needed to complete the last leg of our journey …

We reached Melbourne in time for two social engagements on the weekend before Christmas. First we pulled up in the caravan outside my parents’ house, and the girls sprinted down the driveway yelling “Grandma! Papa!” There were hugs all around and we talked about caravans and camping and contraband coffee as the girls tried to sit on laps and jump around at the same time. My parents were due to host the family Christmas, and Skyla was appointed the waitress so she began drawing up a menu list and asking about guests.
The next day we were reunited with my brother Tim, his wife Brigid and their son Henry before they left for Christmas in Brisbane. Once again we all hugged and called out and babbled about bits of our trip. It was great to see everyone, but we couldn’t leave the present opening ceremony too long.

Papa spent most of his afternoon undoing clips from Henry’s presents

Reading corner with the cousins

Story time with papa will never be the same now that he has his iPad

After a barbecue lunch, catching up with my brother’s family in Canada on Skype, and seeing Aunts Gabrielle and Mare in person we set off in the afternoon to my yearly Christmas dinner with old uni friends. Or we would have set off, except that for the first time in the entire journey, the car wouldn’t start. Luckily we had a replacement car (mum and dad’s!)

Our yearly catchups with friends from university used to be sedate affairs, but now they are raucous gatherings with hordes of children running in every direction. Few of us are game to host the catchups any more due to the space required, and this time the dreaded event occurred – it rained constantly. Jo and Corey did a fantastic job of hosting and finding indoor spaces for us all. When Jerome and Kayla and Joel arrived from Albury we had almost a full set of the original friends that had come together twenty years earlier!

We had only stayed at Lake Hume for three nights, but the caravan seemed to be in disarray. By the time we packed up and bought supplies at Thurgoona it was after lunch. We were looking to stay in a bush setting somewhere close to the Hume Highway between Albury and Melbourne, and picked out the Warby Ranges near Wangarratta. We carefully drove down the highway with locusts slamming into the car from almost every direction. We possibly should have stopped, or put a grille on the car, but none of us wanted to open the door.
The car nearly overheated getting to the top of the Warby Ranges for the first camping ground, which was closed due to wet weather. The second camping ground, simply labelled “The Camp”, was a great spot, in perfect condition – possibly because the turnoff was almost impossible to find.
We were in the Killawarra Forest, now part of the Warby-Ovens National Park. The forest was red ironbark and grey box, of a type which once extended through much of inland Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland. Unfortunately box ironbark forest was always the first cleared, as it was valuable for faming. Box-ironbark forests aren’t as spectacular as mountain forests or rainforest, and it is only very recently that the few remaining patches have been incorporated into National Parks.
This particular forest was hardly “wilderness” (if such a term exists in a country that has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years). During the depression in the 1930s unemployed men were employed to build roads and cut timber for railways sleepers and fencing in the Killawarra forest. During World War II camps housed up to 40 Italian “aliens” who cut wood for charcoal and firewood. After the war the land was used for post and pole cutting, firewood collection and grazing. Most of the trees are young regrowth, but the understorey abounds with plants and wildlife.
We shared the campsite with another couple who weren't the average retired grey nomads. They had an offroad caravan, and spent a lot of time in beautiful places off the beaten track. They had enough solar panels (and a generator) to be self-sufficient in power, and rarely stayed at the regular tourist venues.They had been moving around the mountainous north-east of Victoria, where they had seen a lot of wild and gushing rivers. They had shifted from the high country for a few days because locals had predicted a cold snap, heavy rain and snow. That seemed unlikely to me as I blinked in the bright sunshine, but I did say that we had brought rain to every place on the east coast of Australia we had visited.

In the morning we went for a nature walk, before a cold wind sprang up and the rain came down in buckets. We packed up the caravan in the rain, which is a lot easier than packing up a tent in the rain. Heavy rain continued and visibility was poor on the drive to Melbourne, although at least we didn’t have to worry about locusts.

From Narrabeen to Albury along the Hume Highway is about 580km, a distance we had never travelled in one day. There is good reason we had never tried to travel too far – it was hard to travel consistently over 80km/h without overheating the engine. We took a couple of hours getting from the extreme north end to the extreme south end of Sydney. We had to make dozens of quick lane change and freeway exit decisions, and if it weren't for the GPS we would probably still be there. The car almost didn’t make it to Albury, but my friend Jerome said he was cooking dinner for us and the thought of fresh pasta lured us onward.
Jerome’s family lived in a small flat in Thurgoona, on the northern fringes of Albury, so we ended up setting up the caravan at nearby Lake Hume Tourist Park and returning to his house. It had been five years since we had seen Jerome, and met his partner Kayla and baby son Joel. We all got along well, and the girls loved Joel. We could have talked for hours but the children were already well past their bed-times.

Lake Hume is a large artificial storage on the Murray River, which is used to generate electric power and hold irrigation water. Though the lake looked regular enough to us, for locals it was an astounding sight – after years of drought nobody thought they would ever see it full again. People were making pilgrimages to the dam wall to see water bursting through the release gates.

For at least the lifetime of this tree, water levels in Lake Hume have been much lower

On Wednesday morning I couldn’t find any beaches or designated swimming areas on the lake, although of course these were underwater. I checked at the office whether it was permissible to swim in the lake, given that it provided the local drinking water supply. The man at the office said that most of the recent algal bloom had dispersed, so swimming should be fine!

In my travels around the park I discovered a large waterslide which operated on special occasions. As it happened there would be an end of year school excursion arriving later in the day. The guy in charge said that Skyla and Melody could join in for free as long as they followed the rules. We arrived, with Skyla and Melody already nervous about the towering waterslide, to find that the school group consisted of about 100 energetic teenagers. Somehow the girls found the courage to climb the ladder, hurtle down the slide and then swim for their lives at the bottom before they were bombarded by a tangle of arms and legs.

We met Jerome at the “farm” after lunch. Jerome works at the National Environment Centre, part of Riverina Institute of Tafe. For someone who likes the outdoors, sustainability and pondering life questions Jerome has found the perfect job. His role is to mentor the Diploma of Agriculture students as they make management decisions on a farm that runs using sustainable agriculture / permaculture principles. Students must decide on stocking rates, what to plant and who cleans up after the pigs. Jerome and his boss pretend to sit back and let it happen while carefully making sure the farm doesn’t go too far off the rails.

We received an environmental tour of the farm which featured animals that might be attractive to children. We watched the pigs snuffling and then moved to a paddock which contained two alpacas, a flock of sheep and a donkey. The alpacas, having longer necks and extra height, look out for the flock and guard against danger. The donkey is ready is ready to kick any hostile strangers. A great arrangement all round. Fortunately the donkey warmed to us.

Jerome had to return to the office before they finished the rest of the Christmas luncheon, so we went down the road to the Charles Sturt University Thurgoona campus. Being new, it has also been built with sustainability principles in mind. The library had a series of lights equipped with motion sensors on the ceiling. A light would shut down if it didn't detect movement for a certain period. This meant that when I started reading a book in the aisles, I had to wave my arms in the air periodically to keep the lights on.

This building has an earth roof. The extra thermal mass means that it saves heating / cooling costs and makes a great surface for roly poly.

Sustainable Christmas tree part 2

Thurgoona is a new suburb, which currently consists of a university and TAFE, a supermarket and a few houses. But Thurgoona is the centrepiece of the growth strategy for Albury, and soon the farm and university will be islands in a sea of houses. If Jerome and his boss have their way though, the "islands" will be connected to the rest of the bush by parks and wildlife corridors.

Jerome, Kayla and Joel hadn’t been out of Thurgoona for a while, mainly because their car was missing a head gasket. We took them down to Lake Hume Tourist Park for an evening of dinner, guitar playing and the girls showing them various objects they had collected. It was sad to have to say goodbye, although we would see them again in Melbourne at a reunion of uni friends in three days time.