Map of Tassie Tour - Last Rites

Tomorrow is the last day of the Tour. Its not finishing the way we had planned or ever imagined.

Life on the road packed into a box
trailer and car.

For five days now, I've been on the road, after a week at home to lick my wounds. This trip has been for the single purpose of recovering all of our gear from our now dead Avan.

It has taken me 6 days to get from Tamworth to Melbourne and back again - about 2600kms. Others would do it faster but after recent events, pacing myself there and back seemed to be the way to go.

It has been an emotionally very emptying trip. Had it not been for a night with close friends on their farm at Jindivik, east of Melbourne, there would have been nothing but the draining feeling of picking up the pieces of something broken and knowing there was nothing you could do to mend it.

Clearly, the worst day was my visit to the Avan factory at Pakenham, where our broken maison sur roues has been sitting with it's broken leg and cracked back. The folks at Avan were brilliant - from the company exec Mark, who led me to the spot in the back lot where the van sat; to the guy working on new vans who came over for a chat and to sympathise; to the friendly security guy on the gate who waved me through and wished me luck.

It took me two hours to unpack our mobile life into plastic boxes and bags and stack them onto a rented trailer and into the back of the Forester. It was hard work physically in the humidity and harder emotionally but it was a simple act at the very end of the stripping that bought me undone. In my final act, after all the lifting and packing and toting, I returned to the inside of the van and took down the laminated map of Australia we had been given by son Sam and daughter in law Jacquie. It had been attached to the ceiling, above the bed. On the roads of Australia, we had overlaid in texta the tours we had made in the van - north as far as Cairns, west as far as Adelaide and Kangaroo Island and all over the eastern states.

The simple act of stripping the map from its velcro mounts, rolling it and placing it safely in the back of the car was symptomatic of the three weeks of turmoil and resignation since the accident. After three days driving and two hours of work, suddenly, there was nothing left to do but say goodbye.

It was just too hard.

Farewell, goodbye, amen.

The insurance company - GIO - have been wonderful and this week, our claim will be settled and a payout placed into our bank. It won't be enough to replace our van. We'll have to work on that for a bit. Avan have been very supportive and understanding, accepting the hulk and storing it for us until I could return for the last rites. Friends and especially family have been brilliant, understanding how this abrupt change has left us not just robbed us of the holiday we had looked forward to but interrupted a lifestyle choice we had anticipated for at least ten years.

All of these acts of kindness and sympathy have helped enormously.

The only thing left to do now is to accept what we know we can't change and move on. I wish it was as easy to do as it is to say.

When Enough, Is Enough, Is Enough

We started our trip home today ... from Melbourne.

It was raining as we left, stopped for fifteen minutes along the way and then a few minutes before we reached Narrandra. That made more than 400kms of wet weather driving. Unpleasant but symptomatic of the last week.

This tour was called the Map of Tassie Tour and should have involved seven weeks touring the only place in Australia we haven't been. We had tried to get there eleven months ago but a drug-crazed maniac in a stolen car smashed the four passenger side panels on our car three days before we were due to leave. This time, we made it as far as Melbourne - to within one kilometre of the boat in fact - when we somehow managed to have an accident with a Lambourgini.

The last nine days we had been on a holding pattern, waiting for an assessment of the damage by our insurer. In the interim, we can't speak highly enough of GIO for their support, speed and directness in helping us and for the wonderful generosity of Ashley Gardens Caravan Park for providing us with high quality accommodation, changing their bookings as our circumstances changed and for the incredible tariff reduction. Faith gets restored in humans just when you need it.

The assessor rang yesterday and told us to go home, as it might take a while. He rang today, as we drove into Narrandera, our overnight stop on the three day drive home. This time he delivered the killer blow. We knew the stub axle was snapped clean off. We knew that the van skin needed repair. We knew that stuff.

The rain, which had attacked us all the way from Melbourne, had just started to ease, when he rang to tell us the Avan had four cracks in the frame and he would be writing it off. "How soon can you come back to Melbourne and get the rest of your gear out of it?"

Broken and now written off

We have been informed that the van is four weeks outside the full replacement period, so instead, we can expect only a payout. The assessor has assured us he'll put up an argument for management to extend us a leniency but, as well as GIO have always treated us, including this fiasco, I'm not confident. This will mean a payout that will leave us five to six thousand dollars short of getting a new van.

In the mean time, while all that is decided, I have to get home and then return nearly 1200kms back to Melbourne to remove what remains in the van, including a custom built mattress which was made to cater for my wife's back injuries.

Its a confident statement to say this represents any van owner's worst nightmare. It was bad enough to again lose the holiday we had planned and missed out on last year, let alone in such dreadfully unfair circumstances. To lose the van is a debacle.

Yes, its a first world problem. Yes, we walked away. Yes our car wasn't damaged. Yes the fires in Tasmania would have made our trip unbearable. Yes, yes, yes. None of that helps.

We have lost something as important to us as our own home. I have spent an uncountable number of hours customising the van - who doesn't right? All those sundowners spent discussing options and improvements. All those hours designing, creating and making changes to get it just the way we wanted it. All the months we had spent on the road, sharing as much intimacy with it as we did with each other. Its all gone and because of the payment falling short of what we will need to replace it, it may also mean that we are left without the means to add funds to buy a new van.

Buy second hand? Sure. Good suggestion but we wanted the van to last for 15 years and I don't fancy adding someone else's kilometres to my own. It feels like we would be buying more problems.

Do I blame myself? Maybe. I don't know. It was all such a blur. We drove to Melbourne over three days. The last leg was less than 150kms. I was fresh. I was driving carefully, well under the 40km speed limit for the section of road I was driving.

It is all just plain, dumb, bad luck.

Our bad luck ... and the very real possibility that this will be our last road adventure for a while. Quite a while.


In time, we'll probably accept this turn of events. We're not angry. Completely the opposite. We both feel terribly sad. We've lost our freedom. We've been sidelined at the peak of our form and just as we were playing our best game. The lifestyle we had worked for - that my wife had taken early retirement so we could pursue - has been cut off, as though we had fallen mute in mid sentence.

Some dreams have been dashed.

Somehow, it doesn't seem fair ... but with two day's driving until home, I haven't got time for such deliberations.

TOD Tour, Day 15 - Tamworth to Nambucca

After a stressful day of business punctuated by coffee with one son and his partner, some unexpected good news and then closing the day by visiting the other son and his wife on a tour of their almost completed first home and followed by dinner, bed should have offered refuge. It didn't. Just a night of tossing and turning and worry.

There have been so many complications since the day, nearly four weeks ago, when our car had all the panels on the left side damaged by a driver in a stolen car, high on meth-amphetamine, an event, three days before we were due to drive to Tasmania, which sent our stress levels through the roof. Since, there has been little time for recovery so that each succeeding complication, although small if they were to happen in isolation, has acted like compound interest so that our stress levels haven't had time to recede. As a result, we are both struggling and running out of bounce back.

Allowing the better news to percolate to the top and become cream, is the trick. It was good to see the boys; an article on the Waterfall Way has been pitched and commissioned from a travel magazine; and I'll be flying to Sydney next Monday to deliver a corporate presentation for the Black Dog Institute in order to secure funding for the Community Presenters Program. These were all bright shiny things in an otherwise bleak yesterday.

As a result, I woke at 4:00am with a massive dose of anxiety - a sometimes companion and always an unwelcome visitor. It stayed all day, with all its accompanying side effects but on a day when things had to be done and distance had to be put between our old home and the new, going to ground with medication was not an option.

We had two main orders of business in returning to home for a few days. The first was to deliver the Forester for repairs, which was done on Monday afternoon and was joined with the good news that repairs should be completed during the next two weeks. The hire of a replacement had been botched, so we waited about Tamworth for an extra day to have the Corolla we were incorrectly given replaced two days later by the Rav4 we had requested. Packing the Corolla because of a three hour time difference between leaving the caravan park in Tamworth and picking up the Rav4, proved a challenge.

When we eventually went to change the cars, there were more problems, more phone calls, more negotiations, more swapped emails but finally confirmations. As a result, we wasted another hour changing cars. GIO couldn't have been more helpful but it was just another little thing we didn't need.

Our last task in Tamworth was to finalise our affairs with the bank in order to transfer the deeds of our house back into our name and close the home loan account. Smiles all round and excellent service from the CBA.

It was mid afternoon by the time we passed the Nemingha Pub, our outer marker for leaving Tamworth. We'll be back next week to pick up the Forester but it was a step on the journey to resolving one stupid act which has added a week delay.

Our first stop was at Bakers Creek Falls, located at the very head of the Metz Gorge about 20kms east of Armidale, just a short detour off the Grafton Road. The Metz Gorge has been an important mining site since antimony was discovered there in 1876. Gold is almost always found in association with antimony and although some alluvial panning had been happening down at the bottom of the gorge along Bakers Creek for the previous twenty years, it wasn't until the Eleanor Mine sunk shafts for the antimony that the motherload was discovered. It made the town which sprung up around it one of the richest gold mining sights in NSW. Eleanora was established in 1884 but changed its name yo Hillgrove four years later. During it boom years in the 1890's, Hillgrove had two post offices, six hotels, a hospital, banks, a stock exchange, police station and even its own temperance society to annoy those miners in the pubs. Its population of 3000 was the same size as Armidale and for a while, they competed for over which town would last. Today, Hillgrove is a run down old village. Armidale is a modern, university city.

Bakers Creek Falls are small series of falls which drop into a series of splash pools that are almost always in shadow as the Metz Gorge does a sharp U-turn from north to south. They are part of the Oxley Wild Rivers NP but the Falls have an infamous history which has nothing to do with geography. At least five grizzly murders have been committed there.

In 1888, a fellow called Stapleton was murdered here, having his head bashed in, his throat cut from ear to ear and then his dead body was dragged two hundred metres to the edge, where it remained caught in trees and failing to drop from easy discovery. In 1975, John Patrick Newberry was giving two young hitch hikers a lift from Armidale to Hillgrove when they asked him to stop at the Falls. They robbed him and shot him in the back of the head. In 1993, three fugitives with murder allegations hanging over them, stopped a car driven by three Armidale men at Bakers Creek, murdering them and taking their car. At least one of the bodies was dispatched over the cliff into Metz Gorge.

It seems a haven for the unusal. In 1978, Gary Price was driving from Grafton to Armidale when he was stopped at Bakers Creek Falls, about 5:00am, by an unexplained hovering object of very bright intensity and observed it for more than twenty minutes. He described it as some sort of "craft with portholes" when he spoke to the Armidale Express later that morning.

Fox Mulder goes to Hillgrove for secret rendezvous with Scully.

Perhaps it explains why, that despite a new platform being built above and behind the original low wall made from local stone, it is a place which looks deserted. Locals prefer not to visit. The short entry to the car park is rough and rutted with erosion, the pit toilets dilapidated and penned with graffiti and there is an uneasy feel to the place.

Fusspots@Ebor

Happy to leave, we went on to Ebor and a late cuppa with Shirley Heffernan at Fusspots@Ebor. The hospitality is unmistakably welcoming and of the sort which is stereotypically Aussie bush style because its how things really are away from the cities. On the shelves you'll find craft and art by locals and stuffed, knitted, cuddly toys for youngsters, the proceeds of which go to support kids with cancer. I had taught at a nearby school so we caught up on twenty years of gossip.

Once we began to approach Dorrigo, we drove through ten kilometres of what might have been fog but was in reality the low cloud which kisses the Dorrigo Plateau as it rolls along the coastal fringe. The descent down the mountain to Bellingen was slow and careful - strange vehicle and difficult conditions. The Sheppherd and Newell Falls were still teaming down the side of the mountain as we drove past and over them and the Bellinger River was still full and flooding the few low roads which seek farming properties across the valley.

It was a relief to reach Nambucca and our new home, drier, recovered and welcoming now the rain had stopped. Our bed never felt so comfortable.