Breakfast with Lisa & Josh #44

Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Ok, so, listen, you were all right. Van life just isn’t for us. I’m not sure why it took us so long, and having so many hilariously unpredictably, unreasonably, unlucky things to truly realize that we were carrying a van life curse - but this last week truly confirmed that for us. We’re just not meant to be in a campervan…in Australia, in the US, maybe anywhere. The universe has spoken.

Things got so bad with our campervan that well…all I can say that is that we spent just about every day of the last 7 days checking our house battery, smelling our fridge for signs of spoiled food, and also, looking at this -

And trying to figure out how things all went so wrong.

There were some bright spots for sure, when we weren’t checking for issues with the campervan that we literally paid the equivalent of a full month’s rent in any major city in the world to drive for 3 weeks. Some great times when we weren’t driving 6 hours to the middle of nowhere in Australia just to get that same van swapped out or fixed, and then having some of those shops not know how the campervan worked. 

Not that I’m still upset. I’m not. It’s fine. It’s just fine. It’s over now. It’s all coming up Milhouse from here on out. 10 points to Gryffindor if you get that reference.

See? How can you be mad in a lagoon in a beach town in Australia? It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s right by the beach. It’s free!

After driving in a mostly-panicked fashion for 6 hours to just barely make it all the way to Airlie Beach in time for the Campervan rental company to take our van back from whence it came (presumably the 7th circle of hell), we dropped the van off, breathed huge sighs of relief, and realized that we had absolutely no idea what to do now. We were in such a hurry to get out of our leaky, wet, non-working awful death-trap on wheels that we didn’t know anything about the city we were in, what to do next, how to get back to where needed to go, or where we were going to sleep that same night. It was a weird situation, not one that we’re entirely unused to, especially in regards to van life, but it just gave us a bit of perspective as to just how bad the past week had been.

So we hopped onto Booking.com, found the cheapest hostel we could with a private room, and then something amazing happened.

Someone was nice to us.

We had been going from angry phone call to passive-aggressive emails for so long that we had forgotten that people here are amazing, and are super nice and giving.

I actually broke down a bit in the back of their Ute (Australian for pickup truck) and shed a few tears (manly ones, of course) while telling them just how grateful we were that they had shown us enough kindness to give us a lift to our hostel, along with all of our baggage (and we had a lot), that was 6 miles from the place where we had to drop off the van. We were planning on walking in 90 degree weather. They saved us.

At this moment, as a few happy tears streamed down my face, I could feel the clouds lifting, the sun coming out, and it really felt like we were turning the pages of the book of our Australia trip to a new chapter. And this one was going to be much, much better. We could feel it.

After a few nights in beautiful Airlie Beach WHICH IS AMAZING BTW WE LOVE AUSTRALIA -

We packed up everything and hopped on a plane to Brisbane. This is where our Australia trip turns around. This is it.

Right after we finish editing our total mess of the conglomeration of videos that came out of the last few days of van life, and try to turn those into something reasonable. And film our last How to Quit Your Job and Travel the World video. And write this email. And update our website. And do our taxes. After all that. THEN IT’S TIME.

Australia is so beautiful. We can’t wait to see it for the first time since we got here 2 weeks ago.

Videos This Week

This is our story of being evacuated out of the floods here in Australia in our campervan.

This is the turnaround point - the first sunshine in 2 weeks. The best day we’ve had in Australia so far.

Hello Kangaroo friend :)

So, that’s it for this week. More videos coming soon!

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

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