What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
Australia is a big country and a long way from almost everywhere, so Australians become used to travelling long distances. We do it because we have to. Distance becomes part inconvenience, part adventure.
The longest trip I have ever taken, at least in terms of time on the road, was from Sydney to Perth by bus.
We had been married only a few years. We had recently moved back to Sydney after three years in northern New South Wales, money was tight, and we had a mortgage at a time when interest rates were much higher than they are now. We wanted to visit my wife’s grandparents in Perth, but flying was simply too expensive for us. So we took the bus.
We broke the journey in Adelaide to visit my grandmother, but altogether it was more than 4,000 kilometres and close to 50 hours of driving. Three nights trying to sleep sitting upright. Four days on the road. Long stretches across the Nullarbor where the road seemed to disappear endlessly into the horizon, broken only by the occasional roadhouse.
By the time we arrived in Perth we were exhausted and already dreading the return journey. But it was worth it. My wife was very close to her grandmother, and living on opposite sides of Australia was not easy. We stayed with her grandparents for a few weeks and enjoyed the simple pleasure of being together.
About a year later, her grandmother died unexpectedly. That changed the meaning of the trip. What had seemed at the time like an exhausting and inconvenient way to save money became something much more significant. We had crossed a continent because there were people we wanted to see, and without knowing it, we had been given precious time with someone we would not have for much longer.
Travel has changed enormously since then. Airfares became more affordable, and journeys that once required days on the road could be compressed into a few hours. Flying from Sydney to Perth now allows us almost to forget just how large Australia really is. Travelling across it by bus did the opposite. We felt every kilometre.
But perhaps that is not what I remember most. I remember that someone important was waiting at the other end. Sometimes the longest journeys are worth taking not because of where they take us, but because of who is there when we arrive.
The Afterword 
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