Wholesale change and renegotiation

In 2018 we decided to take our two girls out of school for a term and travel up the East Coast of Australia for three months. I couldn’t necessarily take that much time off work so I decided to set up our campervan Dennis as a mobile office and work from the road.

Although I look back at this time incredibly fondly and I wouldn’t change it for the world, I also remember it been really challenging and it testing Nomes and my relationship (at one point we gave up on adulting all together and I stopped the car by the side of road and Nomes got out and refused to get back in again).

So how come something so idyllic turned out to be so hard? I think there were two things, the first was that we have differing expectations of what the trip would be like, and second we had no firm base to negotiate from.

When we’ve lived with someone for a while we build up patterns of behaviour and those patterns result in expectations being established. Sometimes we want to shift those expectations say, for example, wanting to go out with friends for dinner on a Wednesday rather than staying in and binging Netflix. Negotiating this changed expectation is relatively easy because everything else is still quite stable.

But on our trip everything was unstable. Our established patterns from living together at home didn’t necessarily translate into life on the road. Some things were no longer required (say cleaning the pool) but new responsibilites emerged (deciding where we would go, who would drive, what time we wanted to get there and who set up what at the campsite).

Negotation can be challenging at the best of times. But doing it what you have differing and unknown expectations and no stable base to work from is almost impossible.

Want to read more about my work/life adventure?

During our trip I wrote a series of blog posts. It was one of the few times I just wrote without thinking about the ‘angle’. If you’d like to check them out I’ve generously provided links below!

• Hitting the road less travelled
• Escaping an octopus’s cold embrace
• What to do when a bird poos on your head during a business meeting
• Can you inherit a mid-life crisis?
• The answer to poor short-term planning is good long-term preparation
• Slamming into the pot holes on the road less travelled
• Listen to the locals
• Happy trials