The best investment I've ever made

Today I want to tell you about the best investment I ever made.

It was always going to be highly speculative — a total punt — that could have blown up spectacularly:

In July we set out for a family road trip: all six of us (including a teething baby!) in a motorhome.

The plan was to do the East Coast, getting up as high as The Daintree before heading back to Victoria.

Yet each time I checked the Victorian news there always seemed to be a giant picture of Dan Andrews, head cocked to one side, looking perplexed and angry.

We were heading back … but to what?

Rioting in the streets. Lockdowns. Earthquakes. Oh, and COVID. Lots’a COVID.
So we decided that now was a very good time to do a lap of Australia.

Well, actually, I decided that, and then I put it to the family.

Liz promptly pooh-poohed the idea as she was worried the kids would miss too much school. Yet the kids wanted to keep the adventure going, so they came up with a great idea:

They would film a weekly TV show they called ‘RV News’.

The eight-year-old was the host, and he’d throw to his little roving reporters (his brothers and sister). Together they researched where we were going, talked to people, and showed off the attractions to their audience (consisting of their grandparents, their classmates back home, and, many years from now, their own kids).

We ended up getting 13 episodes in the can. Now that’s great for the kids, but let me tell you about some of the saucy stuff that didn’t make it into ‘RV News’.

The Good

We kept it real on the road, often free camping.

One night we stayed on a 20,000-acre cattle station where they let you camp by their horse stables for a few bucks.

During the afternoon, the station owner drove past and must have taken pity on us — a big family sitting in the stinking hot Queensland sun — and generously invited us up to the homestead for dinner.

However, when we arrived, his wife stared at us in horror and promptly disappeared into another room.

Weird.

As I sat down at the table, she re-emerged and placed a copy of a local women’s magazine in front of me. She’d opened it to a page where she’d been interviewed about her life on a large property. One of the questions the interviewer had asked her was, “If you could have dinner with any celebrity, who would it be?”

She had said, “The Barefoot Investor”.

Throughout the trip I met plenty of Barefooters, and it was always a treat (even the oldies who took photos of me like I was a zoo animal — they’d barrel up unannounced, stick their phone in my face, and then spend the next few minutes trying to work out how to take a photo).

The Bad

We were doing our best to stay one step ahead of the COVID lockdowns. And the talk around the campsites was that getting into Western Australia was as hard as crossing North Korea’s demilitarised zone.

And WA didn’t disappoint.

To enter the state you were required to spend a minimum 14 days in the (low-risk) Northern Territory. Fair enough. We dutifully followed the rules and were approved, which came in the form of a downloaded QR code via their G2G app.

We approached the WA border — which is literally out the middle of nowhere— and were met by three police officers. It was 40 degrees, the baby was crying, and the kids were melting down.

I wound down my window, smiled, and showed one of the police officers the QR code.

“We don’t care about the QR app”, she said.

“Sorry?”

“It could be faked”, she said sternly.

“How? I mean, it’s your own app, right?”

She shook her head dismissively.

“I want to see the photos on your phone … all of them.

“And your bank accounts.”

I stared at her blankly.

She must have thought I was a few stubbies short of a six-pack, so she spoke slowly but forcefully:

“Log into your bank account. Log into your personal pictures. Hand me your phone.”

So I did.

The policewoman took my phone and stepped away from our motorhome. About 15 minutes later, she started looking agitated.

“Tell me about THIS photo”, she said, holding my phone up to my face.

“Uh-oh”, I said.

“UH-OH?!”, she parroted back, her eyes bulging.

My phone had incorrectly tagged a recent photo as having been taken in Queensland, not the NT.

“It’s Apple’s ‘uh-oh’, not mine, officer”, I laughed.

The policewoman did not laugh.

At this point Liz leaned over, elbowed me in the ribs, and politely explained the IT error to the officer.

She listened, grumbled, but had no choice but to wave us through.

The Jackpot

I’ll tell you, I have never, ever felt wealthier than I did on our trip.

I got to totally unplug from everything and (in the words of my editor) “drop off the face of the planet”.

(It’s true, after not hearing from me for months the newspaper had all but given up on me ever returning.)

Yet what I earned in return was the privilege of spending large, uninterrupted dollops of time with my family.

See, as a parent, the days are long but the years are quick ... and you only get a very short time to really influence your kids. Because when they turn 18 you have to share that influence — with their friends, with their bank, with their Instagram account, with their boss. None of whom care as much as you do.

Thankfully, life is simpler on the road. It has to be. You’re literally strapped into a confined space. There can only be one song playing at a time (Johnny Cash for me, Adele for Liz, and The Lion King for the kids). And there’s only so much you can cram into a motorhome when you have six people living in it.

What we discovered was that we didn’t need or miss our ‘stuff’ at home. It was a diversion. More space often means more junk. More places to hide.

Instead, we traded convenience and possessions for freedom and adventure … and a funny thing happened. The petty fighting stopped. The outbursts stopped (even from Dad). The kids pitched in and we became a united crew, all looking out for each other.

That’s not to say it was easy … far from it!

When the baby would wake in the middle of the night teething (most nights), we would all wake up. Each morning we’d find ourselves like John Lennon and Yoko Ono with six people in our tiny bed. The kids lived out of their school backpacks. We all wore the same stuff for days on end.

We’d pull up at a campsite and bemused grey nomads would look at us like clowns piling out of a Mini Minor:

“Look, George, there’s another one! And … a baby! All living in that tiny motorhome!”

“You’re brave!”, they’d jokingly tell us.

Maybe.

On the final day of the trip, we quizzed the kids about what was their best experience.

Our (often painfully shy) six-year-old piped up and said:

“I think I’m braver than I was before this trip.”

Tread Your Own Path!

Thanks for reading,

Scott.