Being a bit of a Christmas freak every common room in our house has traditionally been decked out with trees, bells, tinsel or some other form of chintzy Christmas ornamentation. Packing up our belongings for the big road trip meant most of the Christmas collection had to go along with everything else. We did manage to find room in our van though for most of my collection of father christmas ornaments that used to adorn our tree, and a treasured table carousel given to me by the grand sons for Christmas one year. A few of my father christmas tree ornaments were too good to risk bringing, so they are safely wrapped up and are stored amongst our two small plastic crates which house the few items we decided to keep.

This year only our annex is decorated simply with two strings of Father Christmas tree ornaments suspended across the ceiling, a Christmas table cloth, and my Christmas carousel ornament.

It was a pleasure to have Chris, Clare, Luka and Em join us for our first Christmas in our home on wheels away from Perth.

It was a ‘no fuss’ day. Dinner was oysters, a festive roast and an ice-cream bomb. All simple with most of it prepared the day before. We sat around and chatted for most of the afternoon over a drink or two before having an early evening dinner. Of course there were the obligatory Christmas cracker hats and jokes (yes, all heard before, but cause for a chuckle all the same).

After dinner Emma and Luka were tiring from their long day, so we turned TV on in our bedroom and they seemed to enjoy the novelty of watching a well repeated Christmas movie lying on our bed in the van. Chris, Clare and ourselves played a board game. It was a game that involved spacial awareness, and spacial awareness is certainly not one of my stronger attributes. However, I won two out of the three games we played, so either it was beginners luck on my part, or the others really, really suck at spacial awareness. I suspect it was the former!

Now looking forward to New Years Eve. We’re only a couple of kilometres from Brighton Pier, where fireworks are let off. We should get a good view of them from the beach in front of the van park.

Shortly after that we’re going to move on towards Tasmania. A little earlier than planned, but we will have been in Adelaide for about a month by then, and that’s the beauty of this life – as soon as you feel it’s time for a change of scenery, it’s up wheels and off.