By Casey Neill
“Every day I’m mindful of keeping what we created on the road at home.”
Travel was just what the doctor ordered for Corio mum Lauren McDonnell, her partner John Kendall and daughter Lennie, 5.
“The first time we went was because Johnny was made to take his long service leave,” Lauren explained.
“He was working in Altona at the refinery there.
“Because of Covid and they weren’t producing any fuel for the planes, they asked everyone to take whatever leave they had.
“He booked himself in for his six months’ long service leave.
“We’d just bought a caravan like two months before Covid hit.
“There was no plan at all.
“We just packed the essentials. We packed two Coles bags’ worth of clothes and that was it.
“We tidied up and made the house livable for a house sitter.”
They dodged interstate closures and made their way to Queensland then continued north, chasing the weather.
A change of bed and routine took then-3-year-old Lennie some getting used to.
“On the first trip it took her about a month to get into the swing of it,” Lauren said.
“She was quite a shy, really timid little girl before we left.
“Now she is confident, just makes really good decisions, really loves meeting people.
“She’s been the easiest part of travelling, because she is so cruisy and laidback.
“She’s just made it a whole lot easier.
“Both of us being able to experience so much time with her before she leaves for school was great.
“Johnny worked a lot and I was quite unwell when I had her.
“It was really important to have that time with her.
“It’s definitely moulded who she is. She’s taken the best of both Johnny and I.”
They pushed that first trip out to eight months, and while they were away found out that the refinery was closing.
“We came home so Johnny could finish his job and he got made redundant,” Lauren said.
Two days after they returned home, Lauren had an ankle reconstruction.
The nurse and graphic designer spent eight weeks on the couch “doing nothing” – except travel research.
“I didn’t feel like I was done,” she said.
They got a new caravan built and made a rough plan to do Western Australia.
“No plan is a good plan,” she laughed.
“There’s no need to book things in and stress about dates.
“Just go 100 per cent with the flow.
“You need to be super relaxed – you can’t be anxious about dirt or eating set foods.
“When you’re out in the outback you’ve got to eat whatever you can get your hands on.
“You don’t need to be perfect all the time.
“Not everything is a stunning filtered photo. Just embrace the beauty as it is in front of you, without your phone in front of your view.”
They all experienced health benefits from the lad-back journey.
“The amount of outside time, how good fresh air and sunshine actually is for you, and you’re out doing lots and lots of walking,” Lauren said.
“Because you’re active all day you sleep very well at night.
“There’s no stress. You forget how good it is on our bodies.
“I’m a big social person so I absolutely loved meeting new people on the road and finding out about their story and where they’d come from.
“It was the best way to find out about the best camps and beaches.”
Lennie became more confident by the day.
“She’d say ‘Hello, I’m Lennie. Do you want to play?’ and they’d be off for a couple of hours,” Lauren said.
“We made life-long friends on the road.
“Some of the nicest people we’ve met are 60-plus. “They’d ask if Lennie could come over to bake bread or have a cup of tea.”
When they packed for the second trip – admittedly a little better organised than the first – Lauren gave Lennie four small baskets and asked her to fill them with what would make her happy.
“Then we did a lot of swaps at op shops with toys and books,” she said.
“The majority of the time the op shops would do it free of charge, or for a gold coin donation.
“When you are meeting a lot of travel families on the road, once you get to know people, everyone’s got clothes to hand down. It’s just a forever exchange.
“You don’t need to buy special things. To be honest, she hardly even used any of her toys.
“It was always sand, sticks – whatever you could pick up outside.”
Little Lennie was always learning.
“It’s always been a part of our travel life that when we go to a town, we go to the library,” Lauren said.
“We do all the sessions. Whatever free resources we know are happening in a town we attend.
“We carry books and things in the caravan, the whiteboard books that you can wipe clean.
“On rainy days we would get them out.
“She was asking us to read signs, information signs. She’s very inquisitive.
“The informal teaching on the road is so broad.
“You can point to a map and tell them where you are and the name of the place.
“You can tell them how many kilometres you’ve travelled from one place to the other.”
A work opportunity for Johnny brought them home just in time for Lennie to start Prep.
They’d agreed to home school for Prep and maybe Grade 1, but to get Lennie into the school system by Grade 2.
“But the job opportunity came at a really good time,” Lauren said.
“She was asking a lot about her little best friends at home.
“It felt like exactly the right thing to do.
“We only found out about a month before that she would be going to school.
“Every day it was just verbal encouragement, telling her what school would look like and how the school day goes.
“It’s such a massive contrast to ‘let’s spend all day hiking or at the beach’.”
They don’t have any new travel plans – yet.
“Probably in 12 months’ time there’ll be a plan,” Lauren laughed.
“We want to look at a three-month trip to Tassie.
“But after that we’ll start planning some more overseas travel again.
“I think I’m up to maybe 50 overseas countries. I did a lot of that pre-Covid.
“I definitely want to get back to overseas travel.
“I just want Lennie to experience as much of the world as she can.”
