Nobody tells you the trips are numbered.
You think there’s always going to be another one. You plan like there is. Next year, the big one. Next year, the place you keep talking about over dinner. And then one year the big trips quietly stop, and you realise the last one already happened, and nobody stood up and announced it. It just slipped past while everyone was looking at the view.
So this year, before we fly out to Greenland and Scotland, we came to Yamba. Same beach. Same fish and chips. Same sea that doesn’t care how the year went.
We’ve stopped counting the trips. We just show up now.
We Used to Have the Whole World
For a long time, the map was enormous.
We took our parents everywhere. Route 66, the whole ridiculous length of it. A road trip through the UK and Wales that produced more stories per kilometre than should be legally allowed, most of which still can’t be told in front of people we’ve only just met. Las Vegas. Palm Springs. Monument Valley, with the light doing the thing the light only does there. The red middle of Australia, where the road runs dead straight to the edge of everything. Thailand. Italy. France.
For their fiftieth anniversary, we took them back to London and just followed them around it. The streets where they met. The corner where they had their first kiss. We walked them through their own love story like tourists, then drank to fifty years at a gin parlour and laughed ourselves stupid at the West End. You spend your whole childhood thinking of your parents as your parents. Standing on the exact spot where two young strangers decided on each other is a very different thing.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. You spend the first eighteen years thinking your parents are a fixed object called Mum and Dad. Then you put them in a hire car for nine hours, or back on the street where it all started, and a whole person climbs out. Fears you’d never heard. Jokes with no business being that sharp. History that comes out slowly, the way it only does when there’s nothing to do but travel and talk.
I navigated by snacks, on the firm principle that no good decision was ever made hungry. Dee navigated by plan, and treated the plan as law. The two systems have never once agreed, which is roughly how we still run the business.
Travelling with them has been the great joy of our lives. Not the places. Them.
Time isn’t running down. It’s just passing things forward.
And Now the World Is Yamba
Their international travel days feel done now.
We’re not going to dress that up. The long flights, the giant itineraries, the airport at 5am with a bad coffee and a boarding pass. That season has closed, gently, the way these things tend to when you’re not watching closely enough to catch the exact day it happens. These days, Yamba is about as far as they venture. A few hours down the coast, and that’s the trip.
Here’s the strange part. While it truly does feel like a loss that we can’t travel with them any more, it also feels like a circle closing. Which is truly beautiful.
Because Yamba is where all of it started. This is the beach we came to as kids before any of us owned a passport. This is where we learned the tide before we learned the world. There’s a thirteen-year-old version of me still out there somewhere, staging a full emotional protest about fishing, certain the universe had singled me out for this particular cruelty.
For the record, in Yamba, you fish. And for the further record, that same furious thirteen-year-old still holds the family record for the biggest flathead ever landed. I hated every second of it. But also won. Both things are true, and no one has ever once let me forget either.
We made our first memories here, with siblings, on this exact sand. So coming back as adults, with those same siblings, with our parents in the good chairs watching the water, isn’t a step down from Route 66. It’s the same story, told from the other end.
Yamba Runs the Same Joke for Decades
This town has a habit. It keeps staging the same family comedy, just swapping out the cast and the lost property.
Years ago, before he could properly walk, Kai sat on the pier and threw Greg’s car keys clean into the water. What followed is known in the family, to this day, as the Key Rescue. A whole-of-family operation. Grim faces. Rolled-up trousers. A toddler with no idea what he’d set in motion, thrilled with himself.
Last year it was the Phone and Wallet Rescue. Different generation, same town. Dad lost his phone and wallet somewhere in Yamba, so me, Dee and Courtney walked the streets pinging Find My like a search party, followed a faint chime to a complete stranger’s house, knocked on the door, and somehow walked away with the lot. Yamba has been doing this to us for thirty years. We’ve stopped fighting it.
This year it kept the streak alive. Another phone, gone. And, in a matter the family has collectively agreed never to explain, a serve of fish and chips. Lost. But not quite gone. It was found.
When we’re all here at once, it is genuinely the best time we have all year. The table just gets louder, which is the correct direction for a table to go.
This Year, From the Sand
Most of it was the usual, which is the whole point. Champagne and rosé and a steady run of g&t’s, timed to the sunset like everyone had somewhere better to be and nobody did. Matt turned up in full 80s leisurewear, which mortified Elkie on sight, which was of course exactly why he did it. Dessert was a Nana and Elkie production, the kind those two have quietly turned into an institution.
The fishing was slow. The crabs were not, so crab salad went on the lunch menu and nobody complained. We ate under audit, watched the whole time by a committee of birds. A kookaburra, a few butcher birds, some plovers, all of them tracking every mouthful.
Then we heard slapping out on the water. A pod of dolphins had rounded up a school of fish and pinned them into a tight ball, working the edges, slapping their tails to stun them before they fed. Dad stood there holding the flashlight on the water while we watched the whole thing unfold. The sea, running its own family operation, a few metres from ours.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Time
Here’s what we didn’t expect to learn standing on a beach we’ve stood on a thousand times.
Time doesn’t only take things away.
We’d always assumed it ran one direction. You get older, the radius gets smaller, the trips get shorter, the list runs out. Some of that is true. We can see it happening. We’re not going to pretend we can’t.
But that’s only half of it. While our parents’ map has drawn in close to home, someone else’s is flinging wide open. That bald baby who threw the car keys off the pier is twenty-two now, with the biggest head of curly hair you have ever seen. (Nana has forbidden anyone from cutting it. She said it’d be like Samson. Kai said, who’s Samson?. Time moves in more than one direction at once.) And in a few weeks we’re going to sit in a stadium in Glasgow and watch him swim for his country at the Commonwealth Games.
Same family. Same water.
The kid who threw it in now gets in it on purpose. For a country.
That’s the part that undoes us. Time isn’t just running down. It’s passing things forward. And every so often it lets you stand in both places at once. Yamba and Glasgow. The first wide circle and the next one cracking open. The watching, and the being watched.
You don’t get many seasons that hold both at the same time. We know exactly what this one is.
Why We Always Stop Here First
People ask why we come home before we go away.
This is why.
We spend our working lives inside other families’ biggest days. We photograph the once-only ones, the gathering that took a year to build and lasts an afternoon, the table where three generations are in the same room for reasons that won’t line up again. We know what that’s worth. We know it because of tables exactly like the one we’re at right now, with stories we’ve all heard a hundred times, told slowly, on purpose, because the telling was always the point.
Our couples decide their day is going to mean something. We understand that completely. We come from a family that decided the same thing about a slightly sticky beach town on the New South Wales coast, and never once thought to question it.
And Now We Fly
Tomorrow the map gets big again. Greenland, then Scotland, then a room full of noise where someone we’ve known since he was bald and throwing keys into the sea climbs onto a block, and the whole family forgets how to breathe.
The first leg out, the run to Singapore, just came through as an upgrade. A small piece of luck to leave on. The long way round is starting soft.
We’ll carry Yamba with us, the way we always do. Sand in the bags. The good kind of tired. Our parents in the good chairs, exactly where the long way round was always going to lead.
See you on the other side.
