Our New Home

The day before I left Perth was my 46th birthday.

That sounds like it should have involved cake, messages, and maybe a quiet moment to breathe. Instead, we picked up the campervan.

The photo caption was simple: the team and the new home. That was what it was. The three of us were standing beside the thing we were about to live out of while I tried to move from Perth to Brisbane on foot. Whatever HAA had been in speeches, posts, spreadsheets, training walks, and ridiculous sponsor ideas, the campervan made it physical. It was sitting there in front of us with keys, paperwork, cupboards, beds, a Queensland number plate, and not nearly enough room for all the uncertainty we were about to load into it.

The three of us had not been guaranteed for very long.

Less than three weeks earlier, Ben and Ols had become the full support crew over a meal in Joondalup. That story had its own chain of people and timing behind it, but by my birthday the important thing was simpler: they were here, the campervan was here, and HAA suddenly had a home and a crew standing beside it.

So when the photo says “the team and the new home”, that is what it means. Not an abstract support plan anymore. Three people beside a campervan, about to turn months of belief, training, sponsorship, and logistics into the daily work of actually crossing the country.

It was exciting. The pickup was at Apollo in High Wycombe, and the staff were a little bemused by what we were planning to do, which seems fair enough. Three blokes, a six-berth campervan, and a plan to cross Australia on foot was not exactly a standard hire-car conversation.

They gave us a bottle of wine at pickup too, which I think was because it was my birthday. A small, generous detail at the beginning of a day that was about to become very practical very quickly.

There is something very grounding about admin on the edge of a ridiculous dream. You can talk about belief for months, but then someone needs a driver’s licence, someone signs the hire paperwork, someone checks the van, someone works out where bags and shoes and food will fit. The idea had to become a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to charge things, a moving support base, and occasionally a refuge when the day got too hard.

Then, because the universe has a twisted sense of timing, my car died on the Roe Highway.

It could have swallowed the day. Instead, I carefully limped it off the highway, parked it at some shops, deferred the decision on what to do about it, and tried to keep my head on the next task: Cannington Carousel, supplies, food, gear, and three blokes doing the kind of shopping that suggested we were about to cross a continent without being entirely clear on what that required.

My friend and fellow parkrunner, Ben Harris, stepped in. I was in Carousel when he got in touch and explained that he had been a mechanic in the army, so he would be able to take a look. He did, and confirmed that the car was stuffed. The diagnosis was something along the lines of: “there are engine parts on the outside that should be on the inside.”

That mattered. It was practical help, because Ben organising the recovery meant we could keep preparing for the next morning. But it also did something deeper. It reinforced the feeling that had been building around HAA: keep moving, accept help, solve the thing in front of you, and trust that it will be OK.

The day kept arriving in fragments: the new home, the grocery shopping sorted, making it up as we went along. That last line came from the shopping and loading process, and it was funny because it was true. We had goals and vision and a broad plan, but the details were never going to be clinically perfect. Some of HAA was organised. Some of it was held together by goodwill, stubbornness, and people making the next useful decision.

The shopping was absolutely unplanned. Packet noodles, tins, oats, tea, coffee, whatever seemed to make sense at the time. We knew we needed supplies, but we also knew we had another day within range of Perth suburbs and that there would be shops along the way.

The kit itself was a strange mix of ordinary and enormous. Clothes, shoes, bags, nutrition, shirts, tracker, cables, whatever we thought would help. The kind of pile you can make on a floor and still not quite believe belongs to the same life as school runs, work, birthdays, and normal weekends.

Late in the day I collected donated meals from Steve at Poppet’s Pantry, driving to Fremantle in Ols’ car and meeting Steve at his business premises. The food would become part of the first week of the adventure, and it would get mentioned a fair bit later because it was absolutely bloody delicious. The car would become part of the story too, because I later bought it from Ols while we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

There was still space for nonsense. The Richard Branson search party was still active, and I was asking people to be my eyes and ears once I was out there. The serious and the ridiculous kept sitting side by side: food donations, a dead car, tracker links, sponsor jokes, birthday messages, and the knowledge that sleep was about to become a very short bridge into the morning.

By night, the page had 1,122 likes. The tracker link was posted, which made everything feel that little bit more real. The Richard Branson search party was still apparently active. The hashtag was #OneMoreSleep.

It was my birthday, but mostly it was the day HAA stopped being something we were getting ready for and became something we had to wake up and do.

Images From The Day

View the full day gallery 8 more images from this page set are shown there.