After three weeks with the family in Perth, I was itching to shake off suburbia and make a beeline for the bush.
In order to make this happen, I started speaking, in deeply wistful terms, about the simple joys of camping – how pleasurable it would be to travel self-sufficiently, to be able to stop on a whim, to cook over open fires as our forefathers did, to be at one with the glorious outdoors!
Daughter Blaire and her fiancé Colin had just towed their fold-out camping trailer up to gorgeous Lancelin Beach, just an hour’s drive north of us, for a few nights over the New Year weekend. Didn’t that sound lovely, Roy? Perhaps we could borrow their camping thingy? Otherwise, we could hire a fully equipped six-sleeper caravan, for just $80 a day!
That did the trick. Within 24 hours, my husband had scoured the internet and mapped out a six-day road trip for us:
* Driving east for around 400km to spend a night at the tiny town of Hyden and its famous Wave Rock.
* Heading south to coastal Albany and Denmark for two nights – “ooh, aah, beautiful”, said everybody.
* Following the coast up to Margaret River for another couple of nights, before returning home to Perth in time for my birthday.
Not only that, but he’d booked hotel/motel accommodation along the way. There would be absolutely no camping of any sort – no borrowed vehicles and no hired ones. (Truth be told, he was itching to put some mileage on the new Z4, which had been waiting patiently for him in Carl’s garage for more than six months.)
Not a Happy Camper
You see, Roy simply doesn’t do camping. He has been known to remark that his idea of camping is to arrive by helicopter on a lonely outcrop, where a table has been laid with white linen, and the champagne – chilling in a silver whatsit – is waiting to be poured into Waterford crystal flutes.
Sometimes I think I married my mother – she didn’t do camping either… and understandably so, in her case. (That despite being a Girl Guide with double rows of badges up both sleeves.) As a woman who went out to work, cooked for her family every night and did much of her own housework, she refused to spend her annual three weeks’ holiday doing the same in the inconvenient confines of a cramped caravan.
That’s why, during my childhood family road trips throughout South Africa, we overnighted at hotels and motels (mainly one- or two-star, as we were by no means well-off) – where someone else cooked your breakfast eggs for you and made your (sometimes saggy) bed. Well, if it comes to that, I’ve done it before and I can do it again.
Coming soon: Part One – Western Australia Road Trip: Perth to Wave Rock and Hyden.
