Day 1 Saturday 15/6/19, Home to Geelong, weather cold.

It feels odd leaving home in the afternoon but being a Saturday there are few trucks on the road. The traffic though is reasonable heavy.

As we all live in different parts of Melbourne we meet at The Prado’s son’s (For ease I’ll call our hosts ‘The Truckers’ as they have a trucking business) farm at 3:00pm and find that there is plenty of room to park our vans out the back with power, such a luxury. The Truckers are wonderful hosts and have a large shed with a cosy woodfire. Trucker’s brother and his wife arrive towing their kitchen in pieces on a trailer, we’ll call them ‘The Renovators’. The kitchen and a sofa are piled on top of three old cypress trees that have recently been felled and the whole lot is set alight. This creates a wonderful winter bonfire out in the paddock. We celebrate the bonfire, the start of our trip and St Kilda’s win at the footy with a Sparkling Shiraz and a casserole that each couple have brought. The shed is warm and the food is great. El Prado presents me with a tiny ukulele that they have brought back from Hawaii and Toothless Johnno declares this an ‘MPFJ’ trip, (that’s More Piss for Johnno if you’ll pardon the expression). Oh dear, we’re in for trouble.

Summary Day One – 150Kms, Power, Toilets (and as after 120,000kms of not seeing a wild camel I’m determined that this trip will be different) Camels = 0.