Chapter 5: Settlement, snoring and second-hand wares.

On settlement day, Smash and I packed a hired four-wheel-drive and a trailer with every kind of camping gear imaginable and quite a lot of stuff that wasn’t strictly classified as camping gear. I’d been on Gumtree, looking at second-hand tents, specifically, canvas ones big enough for an adult to stand up in. There were a lot on offer! Why settle for just one? We could get a tent for us to sleep in, a kitchen / store tent and a visitor’s tent. So, three, altogether. This seemed entirely reasonable and sensible to me given the bargain prices I was looking at, and I couldn’t understand why Smash thought I was going ‘over the top’. Did he want to share a tent with our sons or friends when they came to visit? Did he want to be woken up at 6AM by the sound of me clanging and banging around making a cup of tea on the camp stove when one of his greatest loves was sleeping in?

There was also the snoring factor. Without proper sleep I start whining. Did he really think our marriage would survive if we shared a blow-up mattress on the ground for six months, or however long it was going to take for us to build a shed? I’m not just talking about some annoying little snuffle here; Smash’s snoring is legendary. The vibrations he emits can make a glass of water move across a bedside table. Sometimes, he will stop breathing, and the sound that breaks the suspense is like a dog barking through a loud haler. So no, we were not going to sleep in a two-man tent on the ground. Sorry. We’d have two proper beds with proper mattresses.

I spent a lot of time on Gumtree (or Katetree, as Smash started calling it – ‘Don’t bother looking on there for anything, it’s all in our garage’) looking for second-hand tents and equipment. I met a lot of interesting people. Camping gear sellers fall in to two categories: Retired or Disenchanted. Both are keen to rid themselves of everything associated with their happy/bad memories, because what’s the point of having the equipment without the tent? The retired, happy campers were delighted to tell their stories, interested to hear where their beloved tent would be heading off to next. One old guy, Don told me over the phone he’d given up camping because he’d recently lost his wife, June to cancer and there was no one else he wanted to go camping with. He sounded a bit choked up. When I arrived, he had the tent laid out on his front lawn, flat, with all the poles and things lying next to it in order of size and…purpose, I guess. After chatting about June for a bit, he said wanted to show me how to put the tent up. My immediate reaction was, Oh, no, please, please no, because I just don’t retain that sort of information. If someone gives me directions of any kind, I appreciate them making the effort and don’t want to be rude, but the whole time they’re talking there’s 1940’s cocktail party music with sax solos playing in my head. Visual guides are good – aural, not so much. Don seemed offended when I quipped ‘I’m sure I’ll nut it out somehow’, as if I was disrespecting the complexity of his beloved tent and all the wonderful times he and June had had in it. He gestured to the neatly wound blobs of rope all lined up on the grass and told me how June had been in charge of the pack-up and how quick and neat she was. Then he got teary again. Then he told me about June’s marvellous sense of humour and lightning reflexes with the fishing rod and how every night they used to play Scrabble and by golly she was good. I didn’t have the heart to leave. I love Scrabble. So, I stayed and videoed Don’s tutorial on my phone so I would have something to remember – or more likely, something to show Smash. Every now and then when I come across the video in iPhoto, I watch it just to see Don’s face light up when I finally understand that he’s saying, ‘guy line’ not ‘guideline’.

So, by the end of my Gumtree, op-shop blitz, we had three awesome second-hand canvas tents in varying colours and sizes plus heaps of other equipment. Don threw in a humungous tarpaulin, a porta-potty, camp lights, Esky, camp table and camp chairs (the very same camp chairs he and June had sat on while playing Scrabble). I’d also bought anodised plates and bowls, a fancy silver-plated cutlery set in a box that a fidgety man had sold to me through a gap in his front door, negotiating the price in a whispery voice and disappearing the second he had cash in hand. Two bed bases and mattresses, a collapsible table, a hodge podge of cups, glasses, saucepans, frypans, utensils and storage containers – pretty much a My First Kitchen set-up. Then my friend Helen, a seasoned camper herself, lent me a collapsible change room/toilet privacy tent, a Weber BBQ, a crocheted hand towel and six plastic wine glasses. From then on, Smash took over – after all, he is the camping expert – and after running a trained eye over my spoils, (and making a derisory comment about the spice rack), he rooted out his binoculars, Leatherman, compass and billy can, then went to Tentworld for everything else on his serious campers list.

Then we set about packing this impressive haul, or rather, I stockpiled things next to the trailer and Smash packed. He’s the packer in our family, and very proud of his skills. Awakened by being a roadie, refined with Tetris and perfected by cramming event equipment into every available square centimetre of a shipping container. We hired a dual cab four-wheel drive for the weekend, packed it full too, leaving just enough room for the dogs: Goose, our old kelpie girl and Schultzy, a young male Schnauzer who answers to no one but himself. Once locked and loaded, we stood back to admire the road train.

By this point, it’s fair to say we were both very excited. I may not love camping, but I do love an adventure and this time, we were heading off to spend time on our very own block of land – who wouldn’t be excited? Plus, there were the travel mugs. Nothing says ‘We’re Goin’ to Bonnie Doon’ like two travel mugs full of piping hot tea slotted into the drink holders of a four-wheel drive. We said good-bye to our youngest son, Henry who’d come over to look after the cats (Read: hold a party) and set off down the New England Highway again.

We’d left later than I’d hoped. Smash reckoned it would take a couple of hours to be fully set up, (or ‘erected’ as he liked to say as often as he could possibly could). I had doubts about this. It can take me two hours to decide where to put a chair, let alone set up two tents and a kitchen, assemble beds and make them, open wine, get music and a fire going and heat up the leftover frozen lamb shanks. Plus, we hadn’t even decided on a camping spot; there was not a lot of level ground on the block.

‘We’ll be fine,’ Smash assured me, for the third time. ‘How hard can it be?!’

I get extremely nervous when he says that because he makes it sound like a challenge.