October - November
And then, our final mega adventure for the year was dawning.
In May of 2025, we had spontaneously driven four hours from Salzburg to Vienna to watch David Attenborough's new documentary, Ocean as we couldn't find a theatre playing it in Salzburg. The film was spectacular and, as we were sitting in a Viennese pizzeria afterwards having dinner together, I felt this desire to spend more time back in the South Pacific, the part of the world where much of Ocean had been filmed.
I pitched to Tobi, hand drawn on a pizzeria napkin, the idea that we should go down under.
We were already thinking about moving in together, having been dating for close to a year. He still lived and worked in Munich, I was of course still in Salzburg. He was looking for work in Salzburg, I was looking for new flats for us. But instead, I suggested, since we were both planning to move out of our apartments and him quit his job in order to make that work, why not squeeze in a year in Australia first? We'd come back to Salzburg afterwards and pick up where we left off.
He said yes.
Fast forward to 1 October and we boarded a one-way flight from San Jose in California via Honolulu, Hawaii to Sydney. We spent our first week in Sydney in a cute AirBnb, running around the city trying to sort everything out for a year ahead including, most importantly, buying a campervan. Plenty of Australian brunches were indulged in, too.
Unfortunately, the first van we purchased turned out to be (a) far too big for us and (b) mechanically a complete failure and so after two weeks on the road in which we drove 1300km west from Sydney across New South Wales and a tiny bit into the edges of Victoria and South Australia, we returned to Sydney, tails between our legs, to figure out the mess and try again. Not an ideal start to our big lap of Australia.
Nearing the end of October, we managed to return the original van and bought a new one, a much smaller one and one that'd hopefully stay in good enough shape to drive us around. We moved in full-time into Susy, a 2018 Mercedes Sprinter. Having already wasted so much time with the first van, we now had just a few days to cross the entire country, driving 4000km from Sydney to Perth in order to make it to the James Blunt concert we'd bought tickets for while we were still living in Europe.
→ Check out the reel I made about driving across the country for the James Blunt concert!
We made it and then spent a week relaxing down south of Perth in the gorgeous Margaret River area. Our days were spent beach-hopping and not driving thousands of kilometres across the country. In mid-November, just before we had to be at the airport to catch a flight, we spent a night at the Holiday Inn in Perth, a hotel I chose entirely because of the chance to meet Jack, a lost toy the hotel had adopted!
