I've had a few people ask questions about what we do and how we structure our days, so I thought I'd write a post about it.
A Typical (School) Day
On a typical school day we all wake up somewhere between 6am or so (that's Greg) and 8am or so (that's me) and the kids are in between. I am spoilt rotten as Greg gives me a cup of tea in bed every morning. One of us will get breakfast sorted for the kids and then we get ready for our day (dressed, teeth brushed etc). We aim to start our day at 9am with one of us doing schooling with Tilda in the caravan and the other one takes Rory out. Whoever has Rory often uses this time for mundane things like clothes washing, grocery shopping etc or if there is nothing like that to be done, we take him to a playground. Tilda's schooling usually takes 2-3 hours. On days when we have a specific activities planned, like a hike or a visit to a town nearby, we will do less schoolwork on that day and more another, otherwise our day wouldn't start until around 1pm or so.
After school, we have lunch and then head off to do things, like drive to another town, explore the one we are in, visit an attraction and similar. Often a playground is involved, as is a lot of walking. Depending where we are, the days activities are either centred around nature (hiking, visiting the beach or headland, canoeing etc) or town (shopping, visiting interesting places and buildings etc).
We try to keep to a routine in the evenings, with dinner, bath and bed by around 7pm for Rory and 8pm for Tilda.
Weekends are more of the same, only without the school work so we have more time to explore. We try to go to church on Sundays. Sometimes that doesn't work as there simply isn't a church we feel comfortable attending.
A Travel Day
We try to get ready to hit the road by around 9am. This involves packing up the inside of the van so everything is stowed safely for towing, making sure the windows and hatches are all locked shut and making sure the awning is packed down and secured (plus all the other jobs that go in to packing up stuff from outside inside). A final check of the van an vehicle and we're off. Often we do a fair bit of the packing the night before so that there is less to do in the morning.
We typically drive around 1.5 - 2 hours and then have a stop, mostly because Rory is getting quite ratty by then. He used to sleep in the car which made our journey much more pleasant, but the last couple of travel days he hasn't slept and they have been PAINFUL (and then some!!!). Often we will have lunch at this stop and then travel maybe another hour. We have tried to keep our driving days relatively short for the kids.
When we arrive it usually the reverse of our pack down. I set up the inside, open up windows and hatches (those I can reach), and the most important thing of all... getting the TV set up and tuned :) Greg sets up the outside, things like levelling the van, putting the legs down, connecting water and grey water discharge (I do the power and get the fridge turned back on). Set up doesn't take too long as stuff just makes its way to where it needs to be as we use it. Pack down normally takes around 1.5 hours, or less if we have everything stowed the night before.
A (not so) Normal Day
On Saturday we travelled from Mt Gawler to Port Augusta, a trip of nearly 300km. We didn't get started until quite late as we had had a fun night on Friday night celebrating Willow's 11th Birthday and the kids were very tired. It had also rained all night, with gusts of wind and was very cold, so the kids all ended up in our bed and no one slept well. We were very keen to just get on the road as Mount Crawford had been very wet and very, very cold. Without power and no sun to charge our solar panels we were all well and truly over it.
We had to stop at Gawler Post Office as Tilda's teacher was sending some school work to her. Fortunately Gawler PO was open on Saturday mornings (we had checked) as we didn't want to hang around until Monday. We drove through Gawler but couldn't find anywhere to park with our car and van. It was incredibly busy! We stopped quite a few blocks out of town and had to all walk back in. We got to the PO, lined up for a while only to be told the school work wasn't there and they can't do anything about it. We had to wait until Monday to call customer service to get them to give us an official letter to get it forwarded on. Grrrrrr...... the frustration of trying to find somewhere to park, then walking miles to get to the PO only to have the parcel not there ad their staff unable to do the paperwork necessary for us to be able to forward it on was very, very large. We had a quick snack at a cafe there as Greg and I had skipped breakfast to get on the road quicker.
By the time we got back to the car it was 11am. We decided to drive for 2 hours and then have lunch. The drive up this particular bit of the coast, only an hour from the Adelaide Hills/ Mount Gawler (State (pine) Forest) area was fairly uninteresting. The road is long, flat and straight with only salt bush and scraggy paddocks to keep you company. The kids watched a DVD in the car and my hopes that Rory would sleep failed dismally. He talked and chatted and as the kilometres grew he became more and more silly, spouting all sorts of irrational nonsense and loud sounds. It started to drive us nuts.
On the plus side, we did pass some pink lakes at Bumbunga (yep, it really is!!!). You get salt from Lake Bumbunga. We really should have stopped to take photos as they truly were very pinky-purple and were an amazing sight. We just didn't find anywhere on our side of the road to safely pull over.
We drove through to Crystal Brook for lunch. It is a small town with not much open at 1pm on a Saturday. The kids had a good play in the playground there, which was pretty good for a small town, and we had a break from the driving. We had sandwiches in the van. I had gone to buy pizza but the pizza oven was broken :( so it was "boring" sandwiches instead (probably a good idea given that we'd eaten at a bakery that morning and ended up having Maccas for dinner).
We drove for another 1 hour 40 minutes (roughly as I didn't really notice the time) to get to the caravan park at Port Augusta. We set up the van, I took the kids to the playground (2 swings and an old metal slippery dip) for a while, went and got coins for the washing machine and all sorts of mundane stuff. Greg talked to a guy across from us, who it turns out comes from Newcastle, for about 45 minutes while I sorted the kids and van.
We went out to Maccas (yay... not!) because it had a playground and the kids had spent so much time confined in the car. When we got back, kids got bathed, we had hot showers (yay!!!!!) and then an early bed,
I was so very grateful to be connected to power once more so we could have a heater and TV, and to have showers that were super hot and great water pressure. I was also happy to have a washing machine and dryer as all of our clothes were either muddy, wet or smoky, or a combination of all three.
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