Windmills and rocks: parenting on the road 

Posted on 15 May, 2019

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but somehow hubby and I decided to pack up our home and our lives and spend 12 months travelling Australia in a caravan.

Master 7 and Miss 4 were very excited about the prospect of living in ‘Harvey’ for a year (we named our caravan after a Craig Morgan song called International Harvester—look it up and it might make sense…or it might not), although I don’t think they fully appreciated what that meant. Then again, neither did we. Not only was packing up our house and our lives harder than we thought (think: real-life Tetris with all your worldly possessions), but parenting on the road is tough.

You can no longer send your kids to their rooms if they’re being naughty or you just need a break. Our two share a double bed in our pop-up caravan—there are no ‘rooms’ just curtains at the end of the mattresses that don’t quite close. Our whole caravan is smaller than my kitchen back home. Granted, it’s a large kitchen, but still…

Everyone at the campsite can hear you when you raise your voice. Those canvas caravan walls are pretty thin when it comes to an angry Mumma. I’ve started whispering to my kids in an angry voice instead of yelling but it just doesn’t have the same effect.

There’s really no such thing as personal space. Ever. Unless I completely shut them out of the van…but I think that’s frowned upon in good company and anyway, I can still hear them hassling me to let them back in.

There are a lot of driving. Our kids don’t have screens, so keeping them occupied is a constant challenge. While I am encouraging them to make their own fun, and we have a small selection of toys and books within easy reach, they are still young and do need help to stay occupied. Usually, we eat, count windmills (we’ve seen 41 so far; Miss 4 is the best windmill spotter in the family) and listen to music.

We take turns listening to ‘adult music’ and ‘kiddie music’. We’ve even started listening to kids’ movie soundtracks as a compromise—just don’t tell the kids that All Star by Smashmouth was actually a song before the Shrek movie…

We frequent a lot of playgrounds. In fact, I could probably devote a whole series of articles to our ‘playground tour’ of Australia. I search for places to stop based on the quality of the playground rather than the café, which says a lot as hubby is a chef and we both love food. When I Google ‘things to do’ in a certain area, I always look for playgrounds first.

But despite the challenges, downsizing (even if only temporarily) has been amazing. The kids will play happily outside climbing rocks, digging in the dirt with sticks, or chasing crickets—until the day Miss 4 decided she was afraid of crickets and would rather stand at the doorway to our annexe screaming until someone picked her up.

We go for walks and are now quite immune to pleas of “my legs hurt” or “I’m tired”. We collect rocks for fun. Once, when I made Miss 4 leave the rocks she’d just collected outside the caravan she was horrified. “But someone might steal them!” she exclaimed. They were river rocks. We were camped at a river. With millions of rocks.

When it’s cold and rainy they’ll spend hours playing Duplo or making people out of paper and telling stories. They don’t even seem to notice that their fingers are numb with cold. Or that the wind is threatening to blow the whole caravan over. Master 7 has even started writing a book—he dictates, I type. It’s not bad for a seven-year-old, although I may be a little biased.

The kids have jobs and help with caravan set up and pack down. Master 7 helps cook dinners and Miss 4 helps with the baking. And despite Master 7 testing my patience with distance education—trying to get him to do any school work is like pulling teeth (I have a newfound respect for teachers—I have no idea how they managed to teach him anything last year—he’s just not interested), he’s learning a lot just from living on the road.

Yes, we’re living in each other’s pockets. Yes, the children fight and I lose my temper. But we’re together. We’re living outside so much more than usual. We’re meeting new people and dealing with new challenges. And we are all learning to be content, and happy, with whatever we have at the time.

If you’d like to follow our journey, check out @our.family.gap.year on Instagram and Facebook, or have a look at our blog.