First week on the road – Thoughts, reflections and challenges
So, we’ve had our first week on the road.
I’d like to think that we’ve done pretty well; we’ve certainly survived and there’s been no major arguments – a good start! We seem to have got into some sort of routine at least, although we’re still finding our feet with regards to living in a way that isn’t going to blow the budget to pieces too soon.
We’ve also quickly discovered that spending a bit of money on the right things makes a big difference (like an electric lamp that recharges in the car and a power inverter to convert car electricity to mains current so you can charge the laptop and phones etc. on the road), as do the small things (like buying a decent pack of playing cards and a slab of MDF to use as a table/MahJong board!)
The biggest pain so far is – what do you eat when you can’t use a stove, can’t store dairy and can’t even heat up water?
Plus, the begrudging admission that you really do need a certain amount of money to actually have fun and not go mad through stress!
Australia has a total fire ban on at the moment – that means that you can’t use a naked flame anywhere outside whatsoever. This includes camping stoves, which means that for the time being our funky outdoor stove that we were so pleased with buying is rendered redundant. Therefore, the only way to cook things is to use the public barbecues that are at least pretty much ubiquitous around Oz’s public spaces and park lands.
However it’s a not a ‘real’ barbecue, it’s a hot plate. So whilst I’m glad that we can at least cook something, you have to start getting a bit creative because you can’t heat water with these hot plates, so that means you can only fry stuff and you can’t cook rice or pasta or noodles etc.
Add to this is our problem with cold storage. Ice/ice blocks last about a day, but thereafter you have problems. So this means that we also can’t store dairy for a long time – although margarine is fine outside of a fridge so that’s okay. So this means that we can’t store meat or dairy for any length of time.
Until now we haven’t considered just using caravan park kitchens because our budget was so tight. We’ve also been so tight that we haven’t been able to afford takeaway and that’s not all that healthy anyway. But we had to admit defeat here and expand our budget for each day/week and just hope that we undercut it sometimes to save money. There’s no point in doing all this traveling and not enjoying it is there? So hopefully, now, life will be easier.
Another issue is finding our stride with regards to traveling distance versus chilling out/down time versus seeing things and ‘doing stuff’ like visit attractions etc.
Leave a Reply