Wrong Way Round: One Country, One Camper Trailer, One Family, One Amazing Adventure

206 Pages·2015·1.39 MB·English

by  Hendry

About the author
Lorna Hendry worked in graphic design for many years until she unplugged
herself from her computer to travel around Australia with her husband and their
two young sons. On their return to Melbourne she changed careers and is now a
freelance writer, editor and proofreader, and teaches Professional Writing and
Editing at RMIT University in Melbourne. She lives in Fitzroy, but is still
homesick for the Kimberley.

For James, Oscar and Dylan
Contents
Title Page
On the road
School vs Pokémon
Exploring the Coorong
Climbing St Mary Peak
Alone at Lake Eyre
New friends and hot springs
Easter at Uluṟu
Camping underground at Coober Pedy
Crossing the Nullarbor
Swimming with whale sharks
Discovering the Kimberley
A Darwin break
Shortcut to The Tip
Time off in Mission Beach
Back to the Kimberley
Helicopter crash at Imintji
Life on the Gibb
Moving to Lombadina
Whales and crocodiles
Back to the east coast
Home at last
Copyright Page

Chapter One
‘This is the most important thing we have’, said James, waving a small piece of
black plastic in my face. It was a 12-volt triple adaptor. One end had a plug
designed to fit into the battery of our brand-new camper trailer, the other end had
three outlets. Six months before I hadn’t known such a thing existed. Now I was
nearly as excited about it as he was.
‘We can put the fridge in the kitchen and run two lights off the battery at
the same time’, James said. ‘That way we don’t have to leave the fridge in the
back of the car all the time. Like this.’
He plugged in the camping lights. They flickered, then shone a weak yellow
light into the afternoon sun. He plugged the fridge in and we listened for the hum
as it started up. Nothing happened. James peered at the plug and tugged on it. It
refused to budge. He pulled harder and it broke off in his hand, the business end
of the plug firmly wedged in the adaptor.
We ended up hauling the fully stocked fridge into the back of the car, and
James spent fifteen minutes prying the plug out with a screwdriver.
It was an early lesson that when you are camping things often don’t go to
plan.
We were on our first day of a trip around Australia with our two sons, Oscar,
eight, and Dylan, six. We had quit our jobs, rented out our house, enrolled the
kids in Distance Education and left home to have an adventure.
It wasn’t the first time we had been camping. It was the second. We had
done a practice run at Hanging Rock with a borrowed tent a few months earlier.
Just before dusk, after the rangers had locked the gates behind the last of the day
visitors, we set up the tent, laid out our mattresses and sleeping bags, and settled
in for a night under the stars. We drank wine around a fire with the rest of the
campers and went on a guided bushwalk in the dark to look for owls, most of
whom had sensibly deserted their usual spots before we tramped down the track
with forty overexcited kids. The whole experience would have been better if we
had taken pillows, torches, a gas bottle that actually fitted our stove and some
bottles of drinking water. As a training run, though, it did the job.
When we left home for real, we had an 80-litre water tank, self-inflating
mattresses, a two-burner stove with a gas bottle that fitted and a stove-top coffee
maker. We also had a laptop; a fold-up toilet seat; four packs of cards; an axe;
four books of maps; a logbook to record our mileage and fuel consumption; an
iPod with 6000 songs, a complete set of Spanish lessons and six Harry Potter
books read by Stephen Fry loaded onto it; a 20-metre extension cord; a barbecue
plate; a bottle of vodka in an unbreakable container; and a kitchen sink.
That first day we had driven 233 kilometres from Melbourne to Port
Campbell on the Great Ocean Road. Not a huge distance, but we weren’t in a
hurry; we had a whole year to make our way around the country. That day we
spent more time putting up our tent than we had spent in the car, even including
an unscheduled stop at the base of the West Gate Bridge. We had to pull up to
calm Dylan down, who was sobbing loudly in the back. The reality of our trip
only hit him when he saw the bridge and realised we were about to drive out of
Melbourne and not come back. James and I had spent three years planning this,
but it wasn’t until that moment that it dawned on Dylan that he wouldn’t see any
of his friends for a year.
To cheer him up, James let both boys climb onto the roof rack and ride on
top of the car while he drove it slowly around the car park of the petrol station. I
was pretty sure that was illegal but I didn’t want to have an argument with James
in the first half-hour. I fussed around on the ground, terrified that they would fall
off and our trip would begin with a day at the hospital having broken legs set in
plaster. But they held on tight and Dylan completely forgot to be sad about what
he was leaving behind. I bundled them back into the car and when we reached
the top of the West Gate all four of us cheered the start of our adventure.
Setting up the camper trailer wasn’t as easy as we had expected. Despite
being given a demonstration when we bought it, and having a practice go before
we left, our first argument was about which way we should park the trailer on
the site. We tried to keep our voices down and the swearing to a minimum, but
the elderly couple camped opposite us vanished into their van as we bickered. I
stopped arguing when I worked out that I had no idea which way the tent would
be facing once it was set up.
After unfolding the canvas from the trailer, we realised that we had lost the
sheet of paper with the set-up instructions. James disappeared into the tent and,