The Race to Isolate!...when you have no home to go to | 4 Boys and a Caravan

What do you do when you are told to go home and isolate, but you have no home to go to?!

Pandemic was announced on March 11th 2020 and many travelling families were on an adventure of a lifetime. Exploring our wonderful country, living full time in their caravans. Suddenly, they were all asked to head home – FAST! Borders were closing and this was a very scary time for many. Especially those families that had sold everything and had NO HOME to go back to! Our 2020 Ambassador family 4 Boys and a Caravan were supporting Kangaroo Island after the bushfires and had no idea what was going on until they hit the mainland. This is their COVID 19 Story…. Real Families | Real Stories!

“These are really hard times for full time travellers at the moment. This is our story about how it impacted us.

The social distance measures were in full swing but we were still able to travel. In fact, we were probably fairly naive in thinking that this is all we will have to continue doing until it blows over. I guess we were fairly sheltered from it all after being in fairly isolated areas with minimal reception and not keeping up with what was going on in the world.

We had just spent an amazing week over on Kangaroo Island and it was time for us to continue our journey west. We got off the ferry and headed to a supermarket to stock up before hitting the York Peninsula. This is where we found out what was really happening and how bad it was getting.

We were parked up with the caravan in a shopping centre car park when we watched a live press conference of the PM. He stated that all non- essential travel is to be discouraged. Well our hearts just sank. Travelling Australia is not essential, even though it is our way of life. Our minds were racing, could we just keep travelling for a bit longer and get to some of the places we were really looking forward to. We were going to be pretty much isolated and away from people anyway where we were heading. We were not ready to finish our travels in SA.

Tom continued to watch the press conference while Aimee went and stocked up on food. The news kept continuing to come in and then the news followed about the borders shutting. Our world felt like it was starting to implode. We couldn’t for the life of us make a decision on what to do. We started going over our options. What is going to be best for our family!

After a few discussions we decided we didn’t want to get caught down south for the winter in our caravan with 4 very energetic boys. We also didn’t want to be unnecessarily forced to go into quarantine. So, we decided we had to say goodbye to SA and hit the road for Queensland. We have family their and Queensland is where we will eventually finish up and buy again. We felt like this was the best option we could think of at this point in time so that we were off the road and could isolate ourselves somewhere safe.

We were now stocked up and ready for a big drive north. We decided to head to the Gold Coast as we had a little storage unit up there with our caravan annex. We figured this was going to be essential for a bit of extra space as who knows how many months we were going to be staying still in one spot. We drove the 2200km in 3 days and during those 3 days of driving it seemed like every border was starting to close around us. We felt like it was a race to get up to QLD before their borders closed too. It was a horrible drive and not one we want to do again in a hurry.

We finally arrived at our chosen caravan park where we have stayed plenty of times over the years and it felt like a huge relief when we arrived. We were still unsure about what was going to happen and if we should head further north or not. After the second night in the park we were advised we had until the end of the day to leave as they were now closing!

Wow, what are we going to do now?

We knew due to costs we would properly have to leave this caravan park anyway at some stage but we hadn’t found anywhere to go yet. We started calling all the parks in the area and a lot of them were trying to charge a huge amount of money for us to stay, even though we had to be self-contained and all their facilities were shut. After so many calls we felt deflated as we still didn’t feel like we had anywhere to go. We went back to reception and explained our situation that we don’t have a home to go to, our caravan is our home! In the end, they agreed to let us stay for as long as we needed and even dropped the price for us. This was a huge relief and felt like the end of such a traumatic time in our travels.

We are now set up alone in this park with only the staff to talk to. At least our kids have the whole park to run around and keep busy. We are now patiently waiting until we get the go ahead to be able to travel this amazing country again.

Check out our video of where our 4 boys sleep in our caravan below…

We have heard of many stories over the last couple of weeks about caravan parks closing, travelling families being pushed out and people getting abused from locals to “go home”. Some even being refused to be served at small local supermarkets and it absolutely breaks our hearts. These families are just like us and don’t have a home to go to and just want to find somewhere safe to wait this out.

We have a permanent spot to do this at now, we are fit and healthy and have everything we need here and we don’t need to move again so we are feeling super lucky.