Reality check - life on the highway

Just in case you thought that every day of the last five-and-a-bit-months for us has been filled with life-changing experiences and dream-like holiday adventures, we thought we'd journal one of our boring days for you.

Life on the road, by definition, involves a lot of travel. And sometimes there's just long days filled with driving. Like, for example, when you're finished with the Northern Territory and trying to get to Queensland from Alice Springs. So here's our day yesterday as we drove from Tennant Creek to Camooweal, just past the Qld border........

• This was our view for most of the day as we traversed the Barkly Highway. Fascinating landscape for about the first 200 metres!
• Spot the Queensland signs. These started just outside Tennant Creek at 471 kilometres and we saw them every 10km for the rest of the day. I thought it was boring seeing them so often, the kids liked the reassurance of knowing we were getting somewhere!

• Singing. Early on in the day I started a sing-a-long, thinking it would waste half an hour of time. Wrong. Mid-way through Old McDonald having a chicken Evie's screams of stopped drowned out our attempts at tuneful singing and so it was over in two minutes. Bummer

• Queueing for petrol with all the caravans. Driving in a headwind at 130km/hour uses a lot of petrol so there were multiple top-ups. It was us with dozens of caravans at most stops.

• Barkly Homestead Roadhouse. This was our lunch (and petrol) stop. As far as roadhouses go, and we've seen a few, it was up there with the best. The floor wasn't greasy, the toilets were clean and I even felt confident enough to let the kids choose some food! We hung out here for a while and played some race car games to break the monotony.

• Army trucks. These provided a good opportunity for counting, we must have passed more than fifty throughout the day. They also provided a good opportunity for story-telling as we all made up stories about why the army was on the move towards Alice Springs. We eventually settled on the fact that they were setting up a new headquarters at the SA/NT border to prevent any more grey nomads with caravans from migrating north for the winter. 

• Selfies. Nothing like letting the kids loose with the camera for an hour or so. The only rule was that I needed a selfie of everyone by the end of it. We decided it was safest if Dylan took mine!

• Toys. Pretty much every toy we have in Suzy Q was taken out and played with over the course of the day. While a motorhome is noisier and a rougher ride than the car, at least the options for entertainment is greater when you carry all your belongings with you and there's a table to sit around.

• Border crossing. Gotta love a good border crossing to add excitement to an otherwise boring day. Unfortunately this one was covered in graffiti and told us we're not allowed to go 130km/h anymore.

So that's how the day unfolded. We left Tennant Creek at 8:30am and arrived at Camooweal at 4pm, only to find we'd lost half an hour coming into Queensland and it was now 4.30pm. After a quick refuel and play at the playground we found a campsite next to the local billabong (which was code for dried up river with a couple of big puddles in it) and felt happy to have arrived.

Brian is flying back to Sydney and then onto Canberra to go back to work, but the kids and I are really keen to finish the loop so we'll be continuing the adventure. We've dubbed this second part of the adventure: "Embracing the Chaos Two - Just Keep Truckin"

Now, to find a truck........