Roadtrip Diaries :: Leaving Adelaide

The removalists came in the morning and demonstrated great feats of strength carting our couch and the bed Tom built us into an empty shipping container. Mum and I sat under the Magnolia tree together one last time and watched. I vacuumed the house and Tom directed his dad in how to keep the fish. We packed our final possessions and said goodbye to our home of the last two years. The stressing and the fighting of the night before were forgotten in our resolve to start a new chapter together. I cried a few more times saying goodbye to my mum, to Tom’s mum, to my little sister whose eighteenth birthday I wouldn't be around to celebrate.

As soon as we hit the highway we were free, the tension that had accompanied the rushed move fell away and we were back to that place we had been on our last roadtrip. It was just us and the road and the terrible/brilliant nineties playlist we had created for the trip. Apart from those few pieces of furniture in the shipping container headed for Darwin, the contents of the car was everything we had. I could not have known how free that would make me feel until we had left everything else behind.