My Parents Bought A Caravan

Nothing ever goes to plan, but that is all part of the adventure.

Join Harrison and his family as they travel around Australia in a hilarious and heartwarming story.

Based on actual events 

My wife Natalie and I purchased a caravan in June 2018 with the goal of spending more time together with the kids. Life was getting too busy and we both were working a lot in order to just get by. It seemed the more we worked the more we missed out on and the further away from that ‘idea’ we drifted. We both decided that the ‘idea’ that we were chasing so hard for really did not matter. What mattered was the time we have right now. 

So we sold a lot of our belongings, packed our bags and headed off at the start of the new year with a basic plan in mind. As a musician I had organised gigs as we traveled which gave us some financial stability. We started a little blog / Facebook page and I also had intentions to compose / write more original music as we went. 

Being an artist and songwriter I am always striving to be creative, however I had lost my ‘mojo’ when it came to music. So I turned to new mediums. I began creating videos of our travels which I fell in love with as well as writing poetry. During our travels things did go wrong, however in order to deal with these I found that writing them down and revising the story really developed the humour in these minor disasters. 

5 weeks into our travels I began drafting My Parents Bought A Caravan. Taking the idea of a travel journal and blog entry and mixing that with my songwriting experience, I incorporated our personal (comedic) experiences and visualised these through our oldest son Harrison. 

We returned home after 8 months on the road and the next few weeks was spent editing the work. I realised quickly that in order to bring this story to life, I needed an amazing artist to illustrate for me. Hannah Kraschnefski is a talented artist from Toowoomba who took on the project and created some amazing pieces which not only compliment the text but in a simplistically beautiful way has illustrated the struggle, resilience and jubilation we encountered throughout our travel. 

My Parents Bought A Caravan is a heartwarming and hilarious adventure of mishaps, resilience and family togetherness. Based on real events.

Available January 2020

Matthew Barker