Barefoot, where the bloody hell are you?

I’m back!

Let’s kick off the New Year with the #1 question people have been asking me over the past few weeks:

“Barefoot, where the bloody hell are you?”

Answer: I took the school holidays off.

My thinking?

Well, I only have 18 summers with my kids, and I want to make each and every one count.

Yet with COVID, our options were a little ... limited.

So I came up with the ultimate trip: camping at a remote national park, some 500 km away.

“Are you crazy?” asked my wife (who wisely stayed home, having just given birth to our fourth child).

“No doubt”, I said, as I bundled my two eldest boys into the ute and set off on our grand adventure.

My thinking was this: last year taught them to wash their hands for 20 seconds, to sneeze into their elbows, and to socially distance. So this year I wanted to give the boys the gift of good old-fashioned grubbiness.

And grubby we got!

We didn’t shower for a week. We did our business in the bushes. We ate off a rusty communal campfire hotplate that hadn’t been sterilised with antiseptic wipes. We slept shoulder-to-shoulder in a tent.

At the crack of dawn our flimsy tent would start getting lighter, hotter, and smellier ... nature's signal it was time to get up and spend the day together, swimming, bushwalking, and playing board games by the fire at night.

Rinse (in the ocean), and repeat.

Sounds delightful, right?

Okay, so let’s take off the rose-tinted glasses:

It was a rewarding holiday, but it sure wasn’t relaxing.

The trip took us eight hours (that’s 56 hours in preschooler time).

Seriously, 20 minutes in, I heard from the back: “Daaad, how much longer?”

And when we got there, we had to set up camp, and sleep three-deep in a stinking hot tent.

And, unlike a resort or a beach house, there was nowhere to hide away from each other.

And no mobile reception, so nowhere for us to hide away from each other mentally either.

And no restaurant cooking us a hot meal … instead we lugged food and drinking water hundreds of kilometres into the bush (and Dad’s cooking skills are already a little, shall we say, agricultural).

Still, it didn’t matter.

See, I’m in the memory-making business, and that holiday is one that none of us will ever forget.

After the year we’ve had, we all need to be reminded of how little it costs to make memories.

After all, think back to your most precious memories: I’ll bet they didn’t cost you a cent.

Tread Your Own Path!