Nomading isn’t for everyone

We were cruising along the east coast many years ago with our youngest and met a couple with a young child in a coastal caravan park.

Parents of solo children often grab any opportunity to extract the obvious fleeting benefits of giving give little Johnny a short-term buddy to run amok with for a while.

They were in a small caravan and we’re truly lovely people …. but its hard to hide behind a pretense in this environment for very long. I can’t recall the specifics, but from a distance I for whatever reason Mum just seemed a little like she didn’t belong, and was out of place.

We were almost the only people in the caravan park and we inevitably met, introduced ourselves and hit it off very quickly. We all got on really well, including the two boys and collectively decide to have dinner together and make a night of it.  They were terrific people and good fun. One of us or the other was leaving the following morning so we enjoyed the lovely night together …. exactly like the Nomad Sales Brochure advertises.

Dad had been poached by an interstate company with an offer too good to refuse so they uprooted and relocated interstate.   Dad was a great guy but not a drinker or player, and after not too long Dad was slowly pushed aside because he didn’t quite mesh with the beer-swilling company social culture and unfortunately the arrangement went a little south.

In the wind-up, upbeat Dad seized the positives and threw up the idea that they seize that positive and embrace a great opportunity to reignite his camping passion from his younger days, buy a caravan and hit the road on an 18mth or so road trip around Oz concluding back in their home city.   Why not, the timing was right, the circumstances were right and it would be a great bonding experience for everyone … another paragraph from the Nomad Sales Brochure.

What an awesome opportunity, once-in-a-lifetime adventure, family bonding and experiencing all that Oz has to offer.   Everyone excitedly agreed, they made it happen and enthusiastically hit the road grinning from ear to ear.

We’ve always been passionate nomads and they were singing our favourite song. While we travel a lot, often, and for periods of upto 4 months we’d not yet experienced a genuine “life on the road” as a lifestyle rather than a holiday albiet long holiday.

We were super interested, excited by their tale, and the ballsy way they taken that leap and thrown caution to the wind and done the one thing that we had long dreamed of.   We’d came agonisingly close a few times in the past but allowed work, family, and the cosmos to conspired against us.

Oh my lord, we were hunger for the details. How long had they been travelling, where had they been, what had they experienced.  We had an insatiable hunger for everything they could give us … tell us everything, and tell us now.

Their situation was very fresh and their traveling nomad story had started a mere six weeks earlier and as yet they had really been nowhere, done nothing, or seen anything.  Never mind, they’d taken the might plunge and hit the road. The rest would come, and we we’re so incredibly envious and in awe of the position they were in.

It was inconceivable to both of us that the fairytale wasnt for everyone, and we struggled to process the fact that the wheels had well and truly fallen off within the first 3 weeks into the adventure, just 3 weeks ago and they were on their way straight back to their home state to get out of the caravan and get back to their suburban and corporate lives. 

If they could have dumped caravan on the side of the road 3 weeks earlier set on fire and flown home I’m guessing they just might have.

We were staggered, breathless even.   It was incomprehensible to us the polar extremes between their all consuming hatred and our equally all consuming passion for exactly the same thing, nomading/caravaning/camping.   The real eye opener for us wasnt that this nomading lifestyle isn’t as attractive to everyone as it is to us, but more just how abhorent the lifestyle can be to others.

I still struggle to understand that the dislike for nomading can genuinely be outside some folks capacity to even fit the ‘I can suck it up because it isn’t so bad, I can make the best out of this and it will be over soon anyway.’   I don’t think I dislike anything so passionately that I literally hate it.

The fact is caravaning nomadic lifestyle caper simply isnt for everyone and the reasons why are numerous and real. We’ve witnessed firsthand that despite what we think, to others its horrible