Lost Caravans
an excerpt

Every now and then I pull out my purple miniskirt and hold it up against myself in the mirror.

‘I fell in love with you when I first saw you in that,’ my husband still tells when he walks in and catches me.

I drop it back into the bottom drawer and flick through the row of oversized tops, pants with elastic waistbands and one-size-fits all dresses stretching out before me. I never thought I would end up being someone who wore pink stretchy pants and a matching floral T-Shirt. More than once I’ve been surprised that the reflection of the middle aged woman with high round tummy and the rolling arse flashing along side me in the shop windows is me.

I’m sure six months of travelling and camping will get me back down to my normal size. All that exercise is bound to have and effect. I’ve got my snorkel and my swimmers still fit. As they should. They are stretchy enough. I bought them because normal swimmers look like seer sucker when the material moulds into the dimples across my buttocks. The folds of Nylon and Elasticine criss crossing my waist covers the poka dots stamped into my stomach from too many years of indulging my sweet tooth.

I lean down hard on the bulging backpack and zip it up. I’m setting off on the trip I’ve been waiting to take for the past 45 years. My tip-of-a-lifetime. I try to be excited, but the spark fizzles before it can catch hold of me. It’s not the way I imagined it would be. A car, tent and esky. Larry doesn’t want to spend too much on set up costs for our first trip.

“We’ll take it easy the first trip, see how we like it.”

It was the end of the day at the Camping & Touring Supershow. We’d started out with the wish list we’d put together. We had agreed that we were older now and backpacking and hostels were not really our style. We’d talked about it all year and come up with a list. We’d started at the displays that manifested our dream. A Winnebago, the Birdsville B2072, an awning on the side we could sit under and watch the sun go down, a trailer for a, Suzuki Vitara soft top, or something similar. Then somewhere during the day we had ended up in the camping section looking at tents and we were each putting our case forward for our preference for a two or three burner gas stove and how sturdy the stand for them may be.

It’s not the first time that this sort of this had happened. We’d planned big trips before, but there was always a reason we didn’t go. “Let’s buy a house and get the mortgage down and then go, I’ve going for this promotion and I need to be around for now, I’ve just got this promotion and we can’t go now.” Then the retrenchments started.

“We’ll go when I get retrenched and get a payout.”

Every year he managed to hold on to his job during their staff purging. Eighty thousand employees retrenched from one of the biggest companies in Australia over twenty five years and he couldn’t manage to be one of them. And then there was no payout, then it was time to wait for retirement. The twilight years of my life. Now it’s the day before our big trip and I’m trying to fit all the oversized clothing I’ll need into my old grime encrusted backpack because after all the camping equipment has been loaded into our Toyota Corrolla Ascent, that’s all there’s room for.