My first journey in a Kia Carnival was a trip to Moulamein during rice harvest. I had driven up to Barham from Bendigo to spend the weekend with my best mate and his family. I was recently back from an Army deployment in East Timor, pockets heavy with saved cash, and excited about everything — medicine, people, ideas, and the freedom to chase all of them. It was Easter 2014, I was between girlfriends, and visits to my Dutch friends were always special.
My mate and his wife were both rural GPs servicing the mid-Murray River. They had a tribe of five kids and a Kia Carnival to prove it.
I can’t remember why the drive to Moulamein occurred. Perhaps my mate was wanting to trade honey for a gill net, perhaps he was doing a home visit to check on a wound. It was school holidays and his wife — also my dear friend — might have been on call for the local hospital. So to get the kids out of the house they too were conscripted for the drive and we all piled into the Kia, zooming up the road at 112kph with the Frozen soundtrack blaring, accompanied by the empty soft drink cans, muesli bar wrappers and crumbs which tend to take up residence in these sorts of kid-movers.
It was an impressive car. Impressive at moving a tribe of kids and adults from A to B without pretension or fuss. That particular Kia had taken a fair hiding before I became acquainted with it, moving bee hives, dispatching kangaroos, and probably collecting the odd speeding fine. That trip was something of a mobile party — loud, sticky, and completely alive. It was a rich life my friends led — one of the richest I knew — but at that point in time I never saw myself as a family guy. A dog guy for sure. But definitely not a Carnival guy.
A lot of rice has been harvested since then.
My friends and their tribe left the Murray to head west, seeking their fortune. I temporarily left my dogs with family and moved to Melbourne to train in aeromedical retrieval. Helicopters were much cooler than a Carnival. But helicopters make poor long term companions. And the adventure seeking, freedom loving thirty-something that I was… well, there was a positive pregnancy test coming.
My first child was a surprise. Her Mum and I hadn’t planned things this way, especially given we first knew of her existence around the time we separated. Child number one was not yet born, but everything changed. I was a father. And being a father means a duty to others that is not optional. And that duty brought clarity. I wanted to be a husband as well.
The courtship with my wife was not typical. She knew of my first born. The first gift she ever gave me was a father’s day present, and that was well before we even started dating. My daughter she loved as her own, and in no time it was the most natural thing for us to want to grow our family. The wedding procession was nevertheless somewhat unorthodox, departing St Joseph’s Church as a husband carrying a child in one arm, and clutching the hand of my heavily pregnant wife with the other. Less than three weeks later child number two was born.
With a hand-me-down booster seat from friends in addition to a workhorse child seat from Dog Rock Chemist, our Hilux was a snug fit. The joy of two kids was too much though — getting to work on child number three was a no-brainer. A small hiccup occurred when the family ute needed replacing unexpectedly; a Ford Ranger this time, courtesy of a gracious team at World of Cars. The nature of shift work my wife and I both do meant that we were often swapping car seats between vehicles, and to our chagrin the anchor points in the Ranger were significantly less friendly than the Hilux.
Child number three arrived safe and sound. Another blessing. Another car seat. We knew the family remained incomplete; the need to increase the size of the car was no impediment to seeking child number four. And so it was that last week, in preparation for the arrival of our next child, my wife and I headed back to World of Cars to hunt for a bigger family car.
We had originally considered looking for a 7-seater SUV — we live on a farm and our driveway needs grading every few years. I also still clung to a certain image of how we’d move the kids around. After poking around the yard, assuring the salesman we were absolutely not interested in a people-mover, and rehashing various debates about how to configure all the child seats, nothing seemed to be the right fit. It was then that we saw the Kia. Silver was not a preferred colour (we are both white car people), but it had only done 102,000km and was good value. The moment my wife saw how easy it was to remove the middle seat from the second row, I knew we had run down our quarry. And so it was, that with a brief farewell to a dutiful Corolla, my wife and I joined the ranks of the Carnival cavalry.
Life is busy. Things are very different compared to when I took my first trip in a Carnival. There is less freedom. There is a lot more responsibility. It is hard work. It is a lot of fun. I now live five minutes from my best mate, his old Kia having been replaced with a tired and well loved Hyundai iMax. We catch up with each other less than we would like, but there’s a season for everything, and for me right now it is the season for first steps and tantrums, story times and school drop offs. Carnival season.