Penguin Books Australia

With the day itself barely awake, we grabbed our last-minute bundles of stuff and climbed into our assigned spaces in the back seat of our 1961 Morris Minor. I had my thick writing pad and pencils, Sal had an unhealthily large bundle of Spy Chick novels, and Jessie brought the three things she could not leave home without: her mobile phone and accessory kit, and a framed black-and-white photo of her boyfriend, BRAD (which he always spelt in capital letters, as if each letter stood for something. Sometimes he even added full stops between each letter, but that's a story in itself). Since Jessie and BRAD got together on the quadrangle just beside the boys' bubblers three or four weeks ago, Sal and I had built up what was now an ongoing competition to guess exactly what BRAD stood for. We called it: the BRAD-test.

Here's how it worked:

I would try to think of four words to describe BRAD that began with each of the letters in his name, then Sally would try to out-BRAD me.

'Hey Sal . . . how about Big Reject And Doofus?'

'No, no . . . I've got one . . . Blatantly Ridiculous Armpit Dork!'

There is no greater source of joke material than a sister with a boyfriend. Especially one like BRAD. We can let rip with strange and goofy versions of BRAD for hours. 'Brown Rabid Alligator Dung' or 'Beaver Ripple Ashtray Drink'. Last Tuesday, just after a re-run of The Partridge Family, Sal pulled out an absolute corker. 'Hey, turkey brain,' she called to me, using her most complimentary nickname yet. 'Check . . . this . . . OUT . . . Buffalo Rectum And Drainhole.'

I nearly wet my pants.

And then, a few days ago, Mum did one without even noticing. 'I don't know why you kids make fun of BRAD,' she said. 'Compared to a lot of young boys these days, he seems bright, responsible and . . . delightful: We laughed till Sal fell off the lounge and landed on the cat.

After an entire minute of wrestling with his seat belt, Dad stuck his left arm behind Mum's seat, swung his head around to face the back of the car and courteously said, 'Get your heads out of the way, you lot'.

He slowly reversed out of our driveway and continued in 'driveway speed' for the first hundred kilometres or so, just to give the car a chance to warm up.

'You sure you know where you're going, Graham?' asked Mum with the voice of experience. The voice of many unforgettably bad driving experiences. All involving Dad.

'Look, luv, just don't you worry yourself,' he assured her. 'I've had a good look at the map and this time I know exactly where I'm going'.

Exactly where we were going was north. Dad's plan was to drive from Sydney to Cape York, the northernmost tip of the Australian mainland. Dad had never been to Cape York before. In fact, he'd never been anywhere near it, but he was about to turn forty, and was obviously having some kind of wrinkle-fuelled old-guy-crisis.

We'd all heard the stories about Grandpa Willie, and how when he was alive he'd been everywhere there was to go. He'd travelled all over this wide brown land of ours. By car, on horse, on foot and once even strapped to a roller-skating camel. He'd seen it all. Every dusty corner of the country.

Except for Cape York.

When Dad was six, Grandpa Willie had taken him to Surfers Paradise, just across the border, but that was as far into Queensland as either of them had ever been. It was Grandpa's lifelong dream to conquer the 2000-kilometre trek from Surfers to the Cape. It was the final piece to his adventurous puzzle. And that's where Dad would come in. He would pick up where Grandpa Willie had left off.

I'd looked at my atlas the week before, stretched my ruler over the map and almost choked on my own spit when I saw exactly how far it was. Cape York was . . . 37 centimetres away! At 80 kilometres a centimetre, that was around 6000 torturous kilometres there and back. Hundreds of hours in the car. Together!

'Aaaaaaaahh!' I tried to scream, but the airhole from my throat to my lungs had shrivelled to the size of a tiny ball of lint. It felt like I was trying to breathe through a sponge filled with honey. Was I hyperventilating? I was hyper-something, that was for sure. On the days leading up to our trip I had gathered statistics. Average speeds. Distances covered during previous outings. My calculations confirmed that with Dad behind the wheel, a trip like this would take at least twelve years to complete, but Dad's plan was to do the whole thing in two weeks – all the time off that the big boss at the box factory would give him – and Jess, Sal and I had been yanked mid-term from the safety of our classrooms, and forced to join him on his insane quest.

It was ludicrous. Ridiculous. Cape York was straight-up impossible. If we made it to the end of our street for afternoon tea we'd be doing well. But the top of Australia? There was just no way.