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.

A new city to explore

Long time no speak - and so many adventures to share with you! They may have to wait, though, because we're still homeless and I'm using hotspot from my phone to access the internet and I really need to be using it to hunt down some sort of home situation. Rent up here in Darwin is so outrageously expensive that we've had to readjust our expectations and ideas of what is 'reasonable'. We're lucky that Tom's uncle and aunty moved up here a little over a year ago and are graciously opening their home to us while we settle since the move was so quick we really couldn't organise anything from Adelaide.

Tom starts his new job on Monday and is full of nervous energy and I'm acclimatising to the humidity in this tropical climate whilst applying for work and preparing for my first (hopefully last, since this is the perfect job) interview on Wednesday. Life is pretty crazy, but I'm loving exploring a new city. Darwin is so unlike any other Australian city, mostly due to the tropical climate I suspect, and I feel kind of like I'm on a permanent holiday in Thailand with the monsoon rains and the crazy Sunday morning markets. I love it here. I was worried before we left, but this is definitely where we need to be at this point in our lives and I'm so excited to find a place and start feeling like locals.

I'll share our road trip another time, but here's a taste to tide you over:

1 back bumper bar missing somewhere along the Stuart Highway
2 shredded tyres
3 swimming holes
8 sunrises
3,766 kilometres travelled (2,340 miles)
4 climates (Mediterranean, Arid, Sub-Tropical, Tropical)

our perfect little road trip

Our little trip to Melbourne and back was a very last minute decision, but so timely. We had planned a longer road trip for this time, but Tom's new retail job put a spanner in those works and it looked like that plan was off entirely. It was so exciting when we realised that we could fit in an abbreviated version of that break. 

This trip proved to be a break that we needed more than we even knew. The distance we travelled distanced us also from the burdens and stresses of the day-to-day and brought us some perspective that we could bring back home. We were able to live fully and completely in the moment and it was a glorious reminder of the importance of time spent together, of time out, of time to just be. 

We sang to bad nineties songs and classic hip hop and bickered over lyrics (I still maintain that the words to TLC's Unpretty sound more like "but at the end of the day I have no self esteem 'cos I'm so stupid"). We stopped to look at silly things on the side of the road and I took a thousand unnecessary photos of Tom's hands as he drove. 

 

We managed to stop in a lot of different little towns along the way. On Christmas day we had a little picnic lunch in Tailem Bend and then continued through to Naracoorte where we spent the night in Tom's sister's house. We drank beers outside and watched the sun set and dreamed together about the house we will one day have and the black subway tiles I am desperate to install in the imaginary kitchen. 

We managed to stop in a lot of different little towns along the way. On Christmas day we had a little picnic lunch in Tailem Bend and then continued through to Naracoorte where we spent the night in Tom's sister's house. We drank beers outside and watched the sun set and dreamed together about the house we will one day have and the black subway tiles I am desperate to install in the imaginary kitchen. 

 

The sun was setting as we left for the last leg to Melbourne. It was something of a miracle that we made it to South Yarra, what with my poor navigational instructions, Tom's entire lack of an internal sense of direction and the fact that the gps and both of our phones were flat as we made it into the city.

We walked through Gosch's Paddock (which is not a paddock, so you shouldn't mislead me to believe there might be sheep grazing outside Olympic Stadium, Melbourne!) to Swan Street and had a beer at the Corner Hotel. 

I rose early the next morning, made myself a coffee and brought it along for a long meandering stroll through the Botanic Gardens. A lot of people were running around the Tan, but I was quite happy to take my time, sip my coffee, and stop to read about interesting plants I came across. Under those beautiful tall trees I felt so small and at the same time so connected with the world around me. I took a lot longer than I had anticipated; it was blissfully quiet and peaceful and I took some time to reflect on the year I'd had and the one to come as I explored. 

Upon my return, Tom and I walked to Swan again to have a coffee (dad has a great machine but we like to sit and watch people sometimes) and pick up a couple of ingredients for breakfast. Tom made the most delectable scrambled eggs with baby spinach, bacon, and slow-cooked tomato. I felt torn momentarily between a desire to fit as much as possible into our only full day in the city and a wish to maintain the relaxed feel of the previous two days of the trip. We opted to take our time and just bask in the lack of responsibility and the change of scenery. It was the best thing we could have done.

We walked to Chapel Street, cursed the after-Christmas sales for filling the street with teenage girls with a thousand colourful shopping bags hanging off their arms and settled into a nice pub for lunch and wine. We met a couple of nice guys who told us brilliant stories about partying in London and Berlin in the eighties and how the clubbing scene changed in the aftermath of the Wall coming down. After a few beers we were lazy and just took the tram to meet Tom's old school friend, Cushing, at Richmond Station. They saw De La Soul that night in St Kilda and I wandered back into the Gardens to see Gravity at the Moonlight Cinema. 

On our way home I insisted on spending some time in nature, so we went through Creswick again and found a forest to explore. An inexplicable wave of something rather like sadness overcame me in this beautiful place, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. What was that feeling? It was terrible and it was blissful all at once and I felt as though I might be rooted to that spot, lost in that moment, for all the remaining days of my life. And then, in a flash, it was gone and I was with my love and we were ready, so ready, for whatever the coming year might throw at us. This trip had cleansed us and readied us and we are so excited and determined and the rest of our trip home is punctuated with discussions and plans for the future, for this year and the many years to come.