I can’t really do a travelogue post about our just ended week away on Kangaroo Island. My brain doesn’t work in that linear, Monday we did this, Tuesday we did that. Added to that, our particular holiday was one of isolation from the information world and one of the advantages of unplugging is that the days start to blur. Time becomes more abstract and you have the opportunity to just enjoy the moment.

Our trip to Kangaroo Island, for me, was one of impressions. Driving south from Adelaide through the Flerieu Peninsula, I was struck again by the vast emptiness and subtle beauty of my adopted homeland. On the cusp of Autumn, before the rains start in earnest, it’s almost monotone – the olive green of the gum trees and the expansive blonde of sun bleached grasses. But then round a gasping turn and you’re dazzled by the azure Southern Ocean which melts at some indeterminate point into the Antipodean sky. I don’t know whether the blues are really more vivid here or if it’s a trick of the brain, but the glistening sea and rich blue sky never fail to overwhelm me.

Kangaroo Island was as advertised – quiet, isolated and stunningly beautiful. The separation from the ‘outside world’ from the clanging, banging, ringing information age was an opiate delivered at a perfect time. It’s amazing how much noise – digital, audio, visual – we’re subjected to on a daily basis and there was no painful withdrawal, just a slowly, soothing sense of calm. It took a couple of days to unwind from the crippling, crisis-ridden crap of the daily grind, but once it hit, our isle of isolation was bliss.

The house was a fantasy, built at the beginning of the decade by a couple of hippies who wanted to ‘live light on the land’, it tries to blend in with the surrounding environment. Inside it’s all native wood and curves and colors, an absolute wonderland for kids. But it was at its best after dark. Maybe it was because the house melts into its surroundings, maybe because the sparse human population of Kangaroo Island allows for a dense animal population, or maybe because we left fruit and veg scraps on the porch every night. Whatever the reason, as soon as the sun set the native fauna turned our hippy holiday house into a nocturnal playground. Dr. O’C didn’t get much sleep the first night because we hadn’t identified the loud grunts and shrieks the ripped through the night as koala calls, hadn’t figured out that the thumps and scrapes coming from above were wallabies (yes, wallabies) wandering around the roof, hadn’t determined that the shadowy forms outside the sliding glass door were just pudgy possums (cute Australian possums, not the scraggly North American opossum). Being a nature lover, I was in heaven. I even got the boy out of bed one night to show him a cheeky little Tamar wallaby that had hopped his way up into the courtyard. It took Boy Z ages to go to sleep after that, but that snaggletoothed smile was absolutely worth it.

We did things, you have to do things with a wee one in tow. But for me, it wasn’t what we did that mattered as much as the doing – the time spent with expecting partner and expected son. Barreling along narrow island highways at 110 km per hour with the two people I love most in the world in close proximity. The scattered and unforced words between us. The music, for me it’s always the music. Whether rattling down a rusty washboard road to Sun Kil Moon, dancing around the hippy house with my son to Bob Marley, or singing along to The Shins while winding through the Flinders Chase National Park.

The things we did weren’t things that I would have chosen to do. I wouldn’t have toured a sheep dairy or paid money to be brought down onto a beach full of sea lions. But the pure and awesome joy and wonder of a child encountering a sheep or a seal for the first time is absolutely worth any amount of time or money.

And that’s why it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t relaxing. Travel with an 18 month old boy is, by definition, not relaxing. There’s not much sleeping in, little time for reading in the hammock and walking on the beach just isn’t an option. Neither Dr. O’C nor I are used to 24-7 child care and we each lost our temper more than once. But a few days in, I began to recognize the gift that this holiday provided. I take a day off a week to spend with the boy and try to keep my weekends open for family time. Beyond that, I get a half hour or so in the morning and a couple of hours at night with the boy – and that offers just freeze frames of his development. A new word, out of context. A new physical trick without the process that helped to form it. During this week together, along with the agony of a whinging toddler, was the opportunity to see him grow in real time. To see the mighty mental leaps that are required to understand that a finch, a kookaburra, a pelican and an emu are all ‘birrs’. To watch the lingual gymnastics required to be able to point out ‘kawawoos’. Slightly disturbingly, to observe the beginnings of deceit – when asked if he’s pooed his nappy, he now responds with the sweetest little ‘no, no’ and an earnest shake of the head.

These are the moments, these are why I went on holiday. Isolation is a damn fine thing when you’re isolated with those you love.

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The Shins’ “Chutes Too Narrow” is available from Amazon.

 
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