There's nothing quite like going home after a long trip abroad. Or that's what we thought. Turns out visiting an Ikea store overseas is the next best thing!

We had long ago made plans to rent a campervan in New Zealand and an RV in the USA, but we hadn't made any such plans for Australia until we were in Indonesia. There we decided to rent a station wagon (farmari in Finnish) with all sorts of camping gear and an option of sleeping inside the vehicle. So a day after arriving in Brisbane we walked to Traveller's Autobarn's office from our hostel and got the car, a little worn white Ford Falcon from the 90s. The driver's door only opens by turning a key, the passengers' by pressing a button inside the car. Retro…

We were generally happy about the car though and took off with it. Sini had the first turn trying to drive on the left side of the road for the very first time in our lives. She did really well in the city traffic, her main problem seemed to be telling the turn signals from the windshield wipers (they're opposite to home!). Beside that we had no other main problems. We parked in front of the Yellow Submarine Backpackers and I went in to get our things. After that Sini wanted to visit the restroom for one last time and I was left alone with the car. That's when we had our first encounter with the Australian police… There was no room to park in front of the hostel, so we just left the car sideways behind three parked cars, mostly off the street. As I was waiting for Sini and looking at some maps a police car happened to stroll by. The officer stopped next to me and asked if that was my vehicle. I was a little startled by this, but answered truthfully that we were only loading up our things from the hostel. She seemed content with that and drove off.

After that it was time for the main event of the day: shopping at Ikea! We had looked up an Ikea store near Brisbane, at Logan, and made a list of all the useful thing we wanted from there. So that's where we went and all I can say is that it was weird. It was as if we had somehow transferred ourselves to Vantaa, the building seemed to be an exact twin of the shop there. The products are the same of course, but even the Swedish names exist here too. Better yet, in the furnished showrooms all of the books are in Swedish! At the restaurant we had the same meatballs and lingonberry jam we get at home, so much closer to Sweden. Everything was so familiar, we could even hear a few people talking in either Swedish or Norwegian and I'm pretty sure someone in the distance yelled something in Finnish. It was unreal…

We "only" ended up spending about $28 (plus the meal) there, but it took hours to do so. We invested in some luxury items, we got real pillows and towels and a couple of fleece blankets to use as sleeping pads (strangely enough the car came with a tent, two chairs, a table, cooking set and a bunch of other things, but no sleeping pads). We mainly went there for the pillows and the towels, I couldn't see myself sleeping for two weeks with my head resting on a pile of clothes if I could get a real pillow for $2.90. Also, we have those really fast drying sports/trekking towels, but while they can get the job done, they are really uncomfortable to use. You end up dry enough, but a little clammy. We got real towels for $3.49, which wasn't too much to pay for comfort.

By the time we got out of Ikea it was getting somewhat late so we had to look into our options of where to spend the night. We got a book with the car showing all kinds of camping spots in Australia, but none of them seemed to be very close. We also got another booklet, a commercial really, suggesting a chain of campsites. One of their places was nearby so we drove there. Or was it here and there? We found that they have specific lanes for U-turns in many intersections and we ended up using quite a few of them. We got there eventually though, only to find that they were asking $36 per night for an unpowered site. It seemed a bit much. There was another campsite just on the other side of the road so we asked them and got a spot for $25. It was called Sheldon's Campgrounds or something like that and we ended up liking it a lot. The toilet facilities were good and we had a streetlight just outside of our car, which was a good thing because it was pretty much all the light we had there. There was also a shopping center close by with an Aldi, a Coles and a Woolworth's (big grocery stores). We got all sorts of food from those to use later on the road. We also went in to the local liqueur store and came out with a box wine. But not just any box wine, a four liter Stanley Cabernet Merlot box wine! It cost us all of $14.95 and was surprisingly good, I had no complaints. No, that's giving a wrong impression, it really was good!

We ended up spending the night inside the car with Sini sleeping on the Ikea blankets and me sleeping on her yoga mattress. We were a little snug there, but managed a pretty good night sleep anyway. For a moment there it seemed like opting for the station wagon was a really good idea…

I think I'll leave it at that. The next post will go into the gruesome details a little more. It turned out we weren't the only ones sleeping in the car…