not so far from home

Travel Tales #5
not so far from home

My kids have already travelled the world. When I was a kid there were no fancy international trips away. We barely even crossed a state border. But that didn’t matter. Anything that was different from home was fun. Or as I would have said back then, totally rad.

We lived near the mountains, so occasionally we would go to the snow for the day. What I remember most about that is standing at the back of Dad’s Falcon, eating sausages in bread for lunch that he cooked on a little tripod BBQ in the carpark. Genius.

And after a lot of pleading Dad finally relented and bundled three daughters, four horses, and camp gear into his truck for a weekend of riding through the High Country.

We managed to get a short ride in on the first afternoon as a storm developed, making all the horses edgy. We spent the night sleeping on stretcher beds under a tarp that Dad strung up between the stockyards and the side of the truck. It poured with rain that night, and the tarp was full of holes so we were all saturated by morning. It probably sounds dreadful, but gosh it was fun.

Our number one favourite summertime holiday spot was the very swish sounding Lake Eildon Country Club.

It's basically a caravan park with a few brick cabins on the shores of Lake Eildon, a large weir on the Goulburn River in central Victoria (Australia). It's close to Bonnie Doon (if you've watched the movie The Castle).

It was only a couple of hours from home but it felt so far away. In our impatience to arrive we pestered Dad with lots of, "how much further, are we there yet?"

Our great aunt had a little onsite caravan there that she kindly allowed her extended family to use. It had small double bunks up one end, that my middle sister and I slept on, a double bed down the other end where Dad slept, and Meg - the baby of the family, got a bed made each night on the seat that wrapped around the dining table.

The nights were always hot and we were pretty much always sunburnt. But we didn’t care, it was summer and we were on holidays.

We’d spend the days in the water. Floating in the lake on tractor tyre tubes, sometimes water skiing with other families who had boats, or mustering our courage to swim atop the unknown depths, past the grey trunks of drowned trees, to empty houseboats, then quietly creep onboard to snoop around.

Mostly we spent our time playing in the pool, learning (or in my case not learning) how to dive. We’d stay there late into the summer evenings, alternating between the steaming spa and the cold pool. If Dad was there to accompany us we were allowed into the ‘Country Club’ to play pool and boardgames.

But we were mostly just happy doing our own thing, making friends with other kids, riding our bikes between the pool and the lake and the milk bar for icy-poles, magic gum and bags of mixed lollies.

It was always really hot and really dry, and smelt like eucalyptus and dust - summertime in Australia.

Sometimes Dad would take us into Mansfield for a fancy pub meal, and we'd all get dressed up in our "going out clothes". We'd always order the same thing - fish and chips, pub raspberry, and a frog in a pond for dessert (jelly with a chocolate frog set inside).

I sometimes wonder if I'm robbing my kids of amazing travel experiences in the future by taking them on international trips. Maybe I'll look into Lake Eildon Country Club for our next holiday. Or maybe I'll just tell them to go outside and play under the sprinkler.

Leonie x