Surviving a Long Car Trip with Kids!...
to the town that Covid forgot.
I’m writing this fresh from a horrendous three and a half hour family car journey. The traffic was bad, the rain was heavy, our two year old dodged his nap then wanted to make his discomfort known the entire journey, reaching a crescendo when he screamed for what must have been 30 minutes straight.
My husband, daughter and I had only two reprieves, the short moments he took to refuel on packets of Shapes. The ordeal made me start panic searching for who to blame: why were we driving so far? Whose idea even was this? Couldn’t we have just gone to the Gold Coast? Then I caught sight of our breathtaking beachside destination.
For ten years my husband and I holidayed together in this patch of northern New South Wales. It was a summer holiday pilgrimage we continued when our daughter was born. We’d even made plans to have my 30th birthday in the town in March 2020 to bring our broader families together in a place that’s so special to us and crucial to my existence (it’s where my mum was conceived in the fifties!)
But when the state government closed the borders they shut off our minds too. My husband and I tried to rebook multiple times, clinging to pre-Covid plans but the restrictions were unpredictable and only kept getting tighter. We would make a booking, get up our hopes then lose it and sometimes deposit money. After so much let down we slowly loosened our grip of this seaside locale, losing too those better beachside versions of ourselves only assumed here.
This trip we’ve rebooked the apartment we first brought our daughter on holidays aged just three months. To see her now taking up more than half the bed in a room that once dwarfed her bassinet, with her two year old brother sleeping next door, is magnificent. This is the stuff memories are made of and we’ve got five years to make up for in a week.
As printed in Village Voice April 2024