Just thought I would write something a bit random.
I have a gypsy soul and love to be on the move, to travel from place to place, in recent years I have become increasingly aware of the negative impacts of travel and increasingly aware of my own carbon footprint, so that has been one factor in the decision to invest in a teardrop, keeping travel local to reduce impact. Another has been the fact that I would often plan long overseas holidays but fail to take regular short breaks, like weekends away, and just hang out for those short weeks of travel escape. I realised how much I missed, just going bush, being in the company of nature. That failure to take breaks was also having a big detrimental effect on my mental health. The pod has given us the ability to simply escape to the country or the beach quickly, it has been a bit of a sanity saver. It does feel like cheating a bit, since it is camping in comfort, but it is still camping. It gets us back to the natural world, away from the laziness of watching tv and out in the fresh air. We go where we can bush walk and star gaze at night. We can go to five star locations and with the pod, we carry a five star bed with us, but we have none of the expense of five star accommodation, at most we might pay for a good campsite, but we often manage to free camp, and some free camps even have showers. I feel very privileged in the life I lead, privileged and lucky to have the escape pod and the ability to escape back to the coast or county. I guess we consciously choose the little, teardrop, escape pod because we wanted to at least minimise our environmental impact, while still giving us the means of comfortable escape. While I sometimes might envy those who travel with their own shower and toilet, I don’t think I could ever be happy in one of the luxurious Hilton’s on wheels and to be honest I am not keen on having to maintain the whole on board toilet set up. Perversely I find a special pleasure in getting up at some ungodly hour to stagger to the toilet block, I love the solitude of a campground at that hour when everyone else is sleeping and I am the only one up, I have the stars to myself and sometimes I just stand in the cool night air and revel in the beauty, the freshness and the solitude of the night.
Just getting away from the city and from work has become so important to me, I had forgotten just how much I loved to be alone in the bush, the reality is I am never really alone it is always the two of us, but I am reminded of a feral childhood spent running wild in the bush with a dog and a horse for company, and how those were the best moments of life. There is something magical about quite moments in the bush, like you really are communing with the divine. I am constantly reminded of the writing of John Muir, that great evangelist of nature: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” We should all spend more time going to nature, in whatever form we can access it and as much as we can, maybe then we will all be willing to address our duty of stewardship before it is to late.
Gum trees and Galaxies 