The Plan.

Like a dandelion before a hurricane, our whole trip just disappeared into the the storm of COVID-19 panic faster than we could ever have imagined.

It was totally surreal actually. And sharing on a personal level, triggered my anxiety in a massive way. Despite the fact that it was outside my control, I kinda felt like I’d failed.

Here was something that seemed impossible to us, that I’d just convinced Katie and the kids we could achieve, asking them to trust me and I would make sure everything worked out ok. I’d uprooted their entire lives, ready to transplant the living remnants of their worlds into a Caravan for the lap. It had been incredibly hard and everybody was nearing the end of their ropes, the cracks were starting the show.

I went away for a big production in Central QLD for 5 days and came back to the entire world shutting down, even our own state borders were closing and as the days progressed, the anxiety built. The light at the end of the tunnel that we’d been fixated upon for so long as our saviour, the end of the pressure cooker that I’d created in trying to build Salt, Earth and Sun the only way I knew how, was now receding. It shrank to a pinprick and like our dreams of travelling the country in just 3 weeks, seemingly blinked out of existence. Now that, friends, was a shock to the system.

The country ground to a halt. Everything was closed. The poor buggers who were on their laps already (we follow heaps of you! ❤️) started making their way home through the same regional countryside they’d seen just months before - except that now, it could be described as nothing less than hostile territory and they were the enemy. If you were travelling in a caravan at that time, it sounded like you were being treated as though you may as well have been throwing vials of the live virus out the back as you drove through town like some kind of COVID-19 version of Father Christmas. Inhospitable doesn’t begin to describe the atmosphere. The dream looked like it was shattered - our van and canopy wasn’t finished being built yet, there was talk of industry shutting down completely for 6 months - it really was all doom and gloom. I expected at any minute to be told our finance for the van had been yanked and that the factory was shut down until Christmas. Game over.

We had no choice but to bunker down and wait so that is what we did. . .Lucky enough to have a house to go into, we set up temporary house with a bunch of stuff we got cheap off Facebook Marketplace so we didn’t have to unload our entire storage shed again (And pack it up again maybe 3 months later) hoping we could make do until the van was ready and the car was done and maybe that would be close to when we would be allowed to move again.

You see if I have one fault (I’m sure Kate would let you know I have maybe a couple more. Four, at most!), it’s forever being the optimist. “We’ll be right! It’ll be soon!” Yeah, well it might not be, but hey, it gets us through. . .

So yeah, where were we? Oh yeah, the title of this article. . . THE PLAN!!! Sorry. . .let’s get back to it. . .

So the plan now is different. . .and to be fair it will likely change because nobody has the foggiest what will happen in the future, this crisis has at least taught us all that. Treat all plans as ‘subject to change’ and don’t assume the world, as we know it, is beyond changing rapidly.

So we now think that we’ll tackle our home state, QLD, for a while once we’re allowed to leave the house and make our way up to Cairns and beyond if we can. We’re thinking this time, we will leave the house set up, just in case they call us back in the near future due to a resurgence of the virus.

But, if everything is sweet and all goes to plan, following that we’ll come back down here to the Sunshine Coast later in the year and pack up the house if it looks like the world, or at least Australia is going to get back to semi-normalcy. Hopefully, then we can start our journey South around September and make our way towards Tassie at a leisurely pace.

What do we know about our exact route? Not much, to be fair. . . even our original plan, as you may no doubt have expected of us by now, was hardly some meticulously planned exercise, pored over in earnest, with the utmost attention to detail. We were pretty loose with it. Loose is good. :) I guess because when you don’t know much, you don’t want to make out like you do and plan something that’s maybe not achievable or maybe just naive. We kind of expected to meet people on the road and want to change things as we went, take recommendations and let the rest work itself out.

Also, we wanted to be able to shift our plans if something came up or somebody suggested we do something we hadn’t thought of. We undertook what little planning we did do based on a route that looks more like a rough outline of an incomplete figure 8, than a traditional circuitous lap. The reason we thought to do it that way was based upon what we’d garnered about the times that places were more, well, hospitable. You know, things like Tassie not being iced over. The red centre not still being hot enough to melt the skin from your bones at 3am in the morning. And that real special part of WA up North not being cyclone-prone with pleasant 35-knot Westerlies each afternoon.

So it turns out that leaving in September/October could be perfect for a plan like that and as it turns out, we’re not really sure how long we’ll be on the road. Initially, we had a 12-month sojourn planned, leaving in February. Now we’re completely confused. :D Hahah but we’ll work it out I’m sure.

We don’t have the finer details as yet. . .but here are some must-haves that we’ve come up with so far.

• At least one month in Tasmania when it’s kind of warm. Katie has said many times, it’s expensive to get over there, make the most of it. (Best time of year brains trust? Tell us! :) )

• Some time in Melbourne with family around Christmas and NY for general looseness and good times. Aunty and Uncles Houseboat on Lake Eildon and catching up with Grandpa a must.

• Uluru around May/June.

• Kimberley around July.

• Upper Coast of WA around August, September.

Aside from those things we know we want some specific experiences, but we didn’t want to overly plan the whole thing. I’d rather just have an excuse to go around again, to be honest. “Oh man, I never did get to go skinny-dipping with great whites in the bight! Let’s do another lap!” kind of thing.

So - yeah, we’ll just wing it I guess.

One thing that we are interested in doing is going to a few more remote places with just the car and getting a little bit off the beaten track. Maybe tent it or swag it, not sure yet. We’ll work it out. Now, full disclosure, I’m no 4WD youtube hero guy the likes of Sam Eyles or Tyler Thompson and despite the fact we have a winch, my idea of fun is not using it 10 times a day doing muddy hill climbs in wet forests in the middle of winter. Gimme cold beer, the beach and a surfboard over cold mud, the forest and my car any day of the week. Having said that, some of our favourite trips have been bush camping and we do love the epic national parks that we have on our doorstep here in SE QLD, so for sure the Blue Mountains and a host of others are on the cards. But again. . .just looking forward to seeing what opportunities we come across.

That’s kind of a plan, isn’t it? Well, we’ll see whether or not the winds of change come gusting through again, scattering them all over the place.

One thing that I’ve had to learn through all of this is to let the *&#! go. Don’t hold everything so tight and really just be at the whim of forces greater than ourselves. For a bit of a control freak, it can be an anxious thing. . .but it’s been humbling. . .and necessary.

Whatever shape our trip takes, it will be uniquely our own and I’m sure we’ll be better for having tried, even if it’s not exactly what we planned. No matter what happens, we’re committed and so freakin’ excited. We can’t wait to get going!