It’s January as I write this. The trip itself starts in late June but there are quite a few steps along the way. In fact, there have been quite a few steps already so I’ll start with a little background.
One night about a year ago, my partner Sarah and I were having a drink after dinner and talking about how much we like cooking together. Then we started talking about how much we like travelling and that took the obvious next step to ‘we should buy a food truck and drive around the U.S. for a year selling Australian food.’ Then ‘we should call it Eagleroo and the logo should be an eagle bursting forth from the pouch of a kangaroo. And I may need to get a tattoo of the logo on my chest’. It may not have been our first drink of the evening but it still sounded like a good idea the next day, and the next week, so we started planning.
Reality set in in semi-manageable waves: we didn’t know anything about running a food truck business so we bought a book and listened to some podcasts about it, it sounded like a lot of work but we both knew how to work hard, we wouldn’t make much money but if we broke even we’d be fine. Then came the less manageable waves like you need a different permit to operate in every location and it could take weeks for each one. As the waves gave way to ocean, we rethought our approach. Since travelling together was the real goal and we are lucky enough to have jobs that we can do remotely , we decided to keep the roadtrip part and give the food truck part the boot. And while I don’t even know anybody that has a food truck, I happen to have a van. It’s a 1997 Ford E150 that has taken a few bands to quite a few gigs. For some reason when I moved to Australia a few years ago, I couldn’t bring myself to part with it. This must be why.
