Road Trip Talks Pt. 1 🚘

New Adventures Await 🌏

Day 0

Getting ready for the road.

Tomorrow is D Day of travelling and living in my car for 2 weeks. And that’s exciting! But also, pretty scary.

For the next 2 weeks I’m going to make my way up to Byron Bay. I’m planning on staying in South Australia for a week or so and then drive up to NSW. I might catch up with a friend travelling in his van for couple of days, but other than that it’ll just be me and my car. And roadside assistance in case I get in trouble (and have cell reception lol).

Ruby the Rangie and Betsy the van 🚐

It’s a bit of a daunting feeling but so freeing at the same time.

I decided to document everything I’m going through and how I’m feeling daily while I’m on the road and share this in a couple of blogposts over the next two weeks.

But before I take off, I’ll walk you through how I came to the decision of doing this trip and how I prepared for it in a very tight timeframe.

The reason why I’m going on this trip is because I am moving to Byron Bay to start working in a hostel up there. I moved to Adelaide in October last year on a student visa. That student visa took a while to be approved, which meant I couldn’t work for 6 months. Once the grant letter finally came through, I was living in a beautiful place called Aldinga Beach, an hour south of Adelaide, and was planning on working in hospitality. Winter was starting so not a lot of places were looking for staff. I did a few trials here and there, but nothing really worked out. After that I started looking for marketing and office jobs anywhere in between Aldinga Beach and Adelaide city center reachable by public transport. I was invited for a couple of interviews, but most places rejected me without even talking to me.

Now, this sounds like a sappy story but trust me it’s not. It’s just something to paint the picture of where my life was at two months after I received my visa grant letter with no job prospect. So, I started exploring my options elsewhere in June. And that’s how I got back in touch with my former manager at a hostel I worked at in Sydney back in 2015. He forwarded my email to the operations manager in Byron Bay, whom I worked with in 2015 as well, and she reached out.

My new work place in Byron Bay 🌴

One month, a flight to Byron, and two trial shifts later, I was ready to pack up my stuff and move up to Byron Bay. Living in Byron Bay has been a dream of mine since I went there for the first time in 2015, so it wasn’t a difficult decision to relocate. It wasn’t easy telling this to some good friends I made down here, though. But unfortunately, that’s the reality that comes with this lifestyle.

Once I made the decision to relocate mid-July, a question came to mind: “how am I going to move with the stuff I accumulated over the months that as much as I wanted them to, couldn’t fit in a suitcase anymore?”

That’s when I decided to tick off another dream on the list: buy a car and convert it into a tiny living space to travel and sleep wherever and whenever I want.

And thanks to the ongoing support of my parents, I was able to make that dream come true as well.

So, now we’re here.

Just a week after I officially made the decision of relocating to another state, buying a car, and converting it into a little house without tools or knowledge about carpentry.

Which leads to the next part of this first part of the travel blog: how I prepared to pack up and leave Adelaide in a car I yet had to buy in just over a week

First of all, I have to say a huge thanks to Stephen, my dear friend who helped me filter through all the possible cars I could have bought with the purpose of converting it into a house on wheels. We started the search early July, and it only took us 2 weeks (!!) to buy a BEAUTIFUL red Range Rover. It had always been a dream of mine to drive a Range Rover. So, I guess that’s the THIRD DREAM TO TICK OFF THE LIST. Imagine how stoked I was.

But also: how overwhelmed I was with everything.

I never owned a car in my life. I was in inner conflict with myself about it too. I was proud of never having owned a car and was planning on living like that for as long as I could. But I shifted my mindset around it, and I made a promise to myself I wouldn’t change my lifestyle just because I have a car now. I will use it whenever I actually need it, but I will still choose walking or cycling over driving when the destination is within a reasonable distance. And I will still choose public transport over driving if there is a connection available.

Anyways.

It was time to check out YouTube for possibilities to build a frame in the back of the car to avoid bolting out the backseats and the spare tire in the trunk and still creating a little storage space for the stuff I had to transfer AND having enough space left over for me to sleep in the car.

Challenging much?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was. It is.

But I did it.

Before buying the car, I drafted a little sketch of how I wanted to build the platform. I didn’t have exact measurements so I just looked at pictures of the Rangie and used my interior architectural background brain to estimate the sizing as well as I could.

Once I bought the car, I immediately started measuring the inside and adjusted my sketches to the right size and just went with the design I had in mind. Inspiration for the frame came mostly from this video.

The following days I started making lists of materials and tools to buy and talked to two of my friends who were going to help me out building the platform. I also bought a pretty cheap but very nice double folding mattress which just fit in the car.

So, timeline wise, the car building process looked a little like this:

Thursday: flew back from trials in Byron Bay

Friday: bought car in Adelaide

Saturday: measured car

Sunday: bought materials (Big thanks to my friend David for helping me push the trolly, carry stuff, and drive to Bunnings about 70 times. Oh, and the chai and fries!)

Monday: built frame (Massive thanks to my friend Jack who couldn’t care less about a detailed plan and just wanted to get the job done. Thanks to him we built the frame in less than half a day.)

Thursday: made window blinds and bought some camping essentials.

Saturday: trial run fitting everything in the car (including my bicycle).

Sunday: bought some final things (mostly tools and a jump start for the car battery).

Monday: GO TIME.

And that’s about it.

I will share a video about the car building process of the car soon.

I’m not going to far tomorrow just yet. I’ll stay in Aldinga for the first night because I need to get my car serviced and go to school in the city on Tuesday. After that, I’ll start driving up north.

And I just want to emphasise that even though it all sounds like I have a very “la-di-da” kinda attitude towards this big change, but that’s mostly a coping mechanism since it has been an exhausting process too. Even for me, someone who’s used to changes and moving around, deciding to move into a new car for two weeks in the middle of winter in South Australia was not at the top of my to do list. It’s not the best timing, weatherwise. But it’s probably going to be nice and quiet on the campsites and it’s been an exceptionally dry winter so far, so I hope that’s going to last for another week.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been super excited but also tired, dizzy, chaotic and hyper organized at the same time and this resulted in some resistance in different parts of my body. I have a pimple that turned into an inflamed monstrosity on my left cheek, I haven’t been sleeping too well the last couple of nights, I haven’t been eating enough either, and I’m getting pretty impatient and just want to know if I can do it and if I’m going to enjoy it.

And I still need to figure out how the little gas stove that I bought for this trip works.

So, I could freak out. But I’m not going to because that’s not going to help anyone and I’m too tired to freak out.

This was a loooong introduction. But I will keep you posted in shorter blogs about my adventures on a day-to-day basis.

Day 1

IT’S GO TIME!

It took me about 2 hours to pack up my car this morning with all the stuff I had prepacked in the last couple of days and it’s a lot, but it also fits. So, YAY!

The first stop I made was at my friend Coco’s place who I am helping out building a website to she has an online space to promote her beautiful book. Coco lives about 5 minutes away from where I just moved out, so it hasn’t been the wildest drive, but still. So far, I’m very happy with how things are flowing.

And now it’s the first night in my car in a caravan park which is still very near the shared house I moved out off. Once I was ready getting the car camp ready and I was all snuggled up in bed, II discovered that the door on the side I was sleeping on didn’t open from the inside. Soooo, I had to crawl onto the front seat to get out, open it from the outside and move all my stuff and try my luck on the other side which did work.

So, yay!

Okay, and that's it for the first chapter of this tiny travel diary blog.

Talk soon! ☀️

Xoxo, Domi