Lucy

Just for clarity, Lucy is not a person, but is in fact our little Jayco Swift camper. Not quite a caravan, but more than a camper trailer and, in fact somewhat like Dr. Who’s tardis.

Now, you are probably thinking ‘who names their camper Lucy, how sad.’ So before I explain how cool Lucy is I will quickly explain why she has a name.

I am not a huge fan of naming inanimate objects, but there are exceptions when they lend themselves to being named. In Lucy’s case her rego ends in ‘UCY’, and sitting around the campfire one night on her first trip to Birdsville in 2016 there was a discussion about naming her (she was only a few weeks old then) and Lucy just stuck ever since.

I am not being sponsored by Jayco (but hey, Jayco, all donations gratefully received), but Lucy truly is an awesome piece of kit. She really is tiny, but after a month on the road (so far), I am not feeling claustrophobic at all.

For a quick overnight set up, we can be parked, set up and ready to climb into bed in about 15 minutes. For a longer stay when we set up the awning etc. half an hour is all it takes, and packing down is about the same.

Inside we have everything we need. A bed pulls out at either end, we sleep on one and use the other for storage. We have a fridge, tv, radio, lights, running water, gas stove and dining table all ready to go, and with the solar recharging the batteries during the day we don’t need to plug in very often, and the 70lt water tank also keeps us going for a while. This all makes camping very cheap, or often free.

And of course, because Lucy is so small, when you hit the road you would hardly notice that she is there. She also has some serious off road capability so basically if our four wheel drive can get there, then so can Lucy.

So what about ‘stuff’. Well, this is where we get to the bit where I tell you that you don’t ‘need’ stuff and that your life is being over complicated by having too much of it.

We are living with whatever fits in Lucy (although it is surprising how much you can actually get in there), and we still have stuff we don’t need.

In preparation for this trip, we spent quite a bit of time sorting out our stuff at home as we basically had to empty the house out. It is actually pretty scary how much superfluous and unnecessary junk you can accumulate after 15 years in the same house. I think that most of us tend to fill the space that we have given enough time, and our house is a fairly large house. Sorting out and getting rid of stuff and ‘minimilising’ was actually a very liberating experience, and living in Lucy for the past month has actually reaffirmed that life can be much simpler and more rewarding with less stuff to clutter our day to day lives. Maybe there is some sort of relationship between stuff and long term contentment? I haven’t finished my research yet, but I suspect that there is an inversely proportional relationship between accumulated clutter and long term contentment. I will report back on this hypothesis in later blogs (maybe).

One day perhaps I will write about the places we have been and the things we have experienced, but in the meantime if you follow us on Facebook at No Real Destination, you can follow the trip and see the photos.

In the meantime, everyone loves Lucy, even the little fella below.