My day started at 4:30am when Rohan slithered into my bed and clung to me like a frozen clip-on Koala toy. When he had suitably defrosted (from stealing all of my body heat) his instinctive drive to ask for food set in, and he began squawking about breakfast.  Torture.
I wish the day got better from that point, but after 11 hours of driving, we are now camped in a petrol station next to a refrigerated truck that is making a LOT of noise. You can all fill in the blanks. My bum is numb from sitting, I am wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday, and I miss my creature comforts.  Whinge. Whinge. Whinge.

This part of our journey is mainly about getting from A to B so I don’t expect it to be brilliant. Tomorrow we arrive in Cairns so hopefully I’ll have much more to report on than numb bums and snotty kids.
With all that said I thought I’d share with you a few more of my brilliant camping hacks.

Food:

I have made about 2/3 of the meals we will need & they are either vacuum sealed (I can’t spell kryovac) or ready-to-go meals in “dump bags”.

Despite sounding disgusting dump bags are my ingenious idea to save on food preparation. For the days when I will use the Dreampot, which is a thermal cooker, I have saved time by putting all the ingredients in a little bag which I then froze.

You can see from the picture that everything is chopped up and ready to go & the dump bags even contain homemade stock paste and spices.

Any potatoes used in the dump bags had to be parboiled first, as raw potatoes should not be frozen.

I also made up dump bags for things like scones, muffins & bread – all of which can be cooked in the Dreampot!!

Here is a super yummy lasagne I made in the Dreampot.

The Dreampot works by holding food at temperature for up to 12 hours. So this morning, I put a stew on before we left freezing cold Bauple, and it was nice & slow cooked, ready to eat when we arrived at the petrol station at 9pm tonight.

All our food has been carefully packed & planned to make sure we have a really balanced diet while we are away (and to ensure Rohan doesn’t starve to death – a deep fear he holds).
Clothes:

There isn’t too much to say about clothes. Everyone only has about 4 different outfits & I’ve eliminated pj’s (for everyone, bar me. I love pj’s). So the kids are sleeping in fresh clothes each night, which they will pack the next day.

The clothes are packed in tiny Globlite travel organisers that fit nicely in one of Frankie’s drawers.  We are all wearing neck to ankle clothes to protect against the sun & bugs.

I’d better get off to bed. I have a huge day ahead of me tomorrow, napping in the car & passing Ben his water bottle frequently, so I’d better be well-rested.

Hopefully, I’ll have more exciting things to write about in the coming days!!

Take Care,

B xx