Starting with: What is the Variety Bash?

For those who don't know - Variety Kids is an Australian charity with a focus on kids (shock!) and the Variety Bash is something they do to raise funds and awareness of the charity.

Basically for 1 year teams raise as much money as they can for the charity. Then we celebrate by driving 25+ Year old cars around

The cars all have different themes and styles. Our car is Toy Story! It's a 1979 Ford F100 and it use to be an ambulance!

Every year my workplace has 4 people volunteer and we fundraise and get to drive the car in the Bash

The idea is you take these old cars out onto rural tracks and outback towns in a convoy so kids can see the funny cars going by. Plus, we usually have donations we give out to the local communities who need it at each place we stop overnight

This was my first year ever doing it and I did not know what to expect.

This was the 2025 Route!

So begins our very first day!

We met up at 4:30am at work to get the car and head to the starting line! Because we raised 43K over the year for the charity we earned a Silver Door. So we had to be at the starting line no later than 7am.

There were so many cars at the starting line! We had 92 entrants this year! I believe they said it was the biggest one they've ever had. Partially because this was their 50th anniversary so everything was BIG

At 8am the chairman gave his first motivational morning speech before we hit the road!

Admittedly, there are spaces where I don't have many photos as I was either taking video or just having too much fun and forgot to take photos

Luckily the official photographer got some thigns I missed!

One thing I didn't get many photos of was our first "Fun Stop"!

Fun stops happen in two ways. Once or twice a day there's a pre-planned one that the event organizers will direct people to. Others are spontaneous. Our first one was a spontaneous one that the Wiggles car started!

You stop when you see the Wiggles car pulled over as they are usually either broken down or making espresso martinis!

I didn't get a shot of it, but in their door they've replaced part of the door to hold the equipment to make the drinks. They've done the Bash many times and are well known for making a good one! (It was delicious!)

The Vili's Pie Patrol car also pulled up and they had warm mini pies and sausages that they were giving out. One guy on my team got star struck as the person handing out pies was Tony Modra. A famous football player

I just knew he seemed super nice and gave me food. But my coworker was so excited to meet him.

After we "refulled" on pies and drinks, it was time to hit the road again! There would be kids sometimes lining up to see the cars go by!

Our car had a rule: Always stop for kids!

We made little bags with material kids needed to make their own Forky's from Toy Story 3. Other cars had other things they would give out to kids on the side of the road watching us. Some cars didn't stop. It's a completely optional thing

I forgot which car - but someone said pretty much every time they passed us on the journey it was because we were stopped to greet kids.They thought it was great

Plus our Forky kits were hits with the kids

We drove past some giant windmill farms until we eventually got to our first lunch stop.

It as at an oval and this is where we got our first taste of how meals would work and our first "problem"

We walked into sports center room that had tables stacked with boxes of food.They had about 400 people to feed. It was sort of amazing how quickly they could get the food out. It was always delicious on top of that.

I have no idea how they could keep the quality and speed up like they did, but I was impressed at every meal.

this meal was a quiche with a side salad

Now, how we know our route is that when we take off from the starting point we're handed a sheet of paper that says things like:

0.54 | 0.54 Km - Right Turn
3.00 | 3.54 Km - Left at the fork
2.00 | 5.54 Km - T Junction, Take Left

Because we can't use google maps. Google maps will tell you the shortest route and we want the not often traveled ones

And we have an app that tracks how far we've gone. It has two things it tracks - current 'lap' distance and total trip distance. You reset the 'lap' after each marker, but if you're slightly off you can also go by the total distance too

You get a set of directions that lead you to where lunch is. Then once everyone is at lunch they let people start to leave and you get another set of directions. It's how they make sure no one gets lost/left too far behind

(we also have some other emergency location apps just in case)

Which is good they are constantly counting us as we did have a few break downs right away

Which is a theme of the Bash as you don't take these 25+ year old cars down the paths we do without a few breaking down. We also have other cars following us called: MVs which are basically mobile repair shops

They're decked out with all sorts of tools to help fix the cars that break down. We also are required to carry certain extra parts as part of the agreement to go on the Bash.

But our first "problem" I hinted at? Ours was as we were lined up after lunch in our car, waiting for our turn to check out.

It takes a little time as each car gets the list of where to go, an offer of water bottles, and any extra information we might need to know about the track coming up.

Something else you get as part of the Bash is what is called; 'Bash Bucks' it's basically monopoly money that you give out and play with at the various fun stops and such.

There was one guy going around washing window from the Chauffeur Car. As their gimmick is they liked to be butlers and chauffeurs. So when he did that for us, we gave him Bash Bucks

As a thank you. Then another team came up and they were dressed as 'toddlers' who were handing out Honey Joys. Which are these: tasty frosted flakes coated in honey!

My teammate (we'll call her Jessie as she was mostly dressed as Jessie during the trip) Jessie decided to give them some bucks as a thank you. Except, when she went to open the bag we had our bucks in, the other person reached into our car, and yanked it out of her hand.

Jessie was shocked and asked for it back. Thinking they were just playing a silly prank - but nope. They would not give it back. Even as she said: come on, we're new and haven't had a chance to play with the Bash Bucks yet. (As everyone in our car it was our first year doing the Bash)

But nope - still wouldn't give it back so we started shouting: Go get them Jessie! You're being too nice! You can get out and try to get it!

As I was driving so I had to keep the car moving at the snail crawl we were going to not block the single file car line we were in. And there's no back doors so the two in the back can't get out.

She did her best to chase down the members of the Toddler car to try and find our Bash Bucks - but it was gone and we were next to check out. She had to get back into the car and we had to go.

She felt bad, but we all told her that it would be alright.

Mostly she felt bad because she was thinking you had to buy dinner with that money and we were just: no.... the event isn't going to let us starve because we lost our pretend money. Besides, we're friends with other cars before this started. We're sure they'll help us out.

But first we got to go past the Midnight Oil house where Bob the Builder team was "fixing" it

(I will say - they had special permission to be that close to the house. We were warned over and OVER that only they could cross the fence to go up to the house. We were not to do the same)

And of course... more breakdowns!

The Mad Max team were driving like crazy people they were often breaking down because of how hard they were on that poor old car

Made a quick stop for petrol in a small town before continuing past a camal racing farm where we got to pet a camal

Now, I'm going to pause and mention my favorite team on the Bash. Team Rat. You're going to hear a lot about this team during the trip. They were just simply awesome and so much fun.

They drove in that tiny car the whole way. They were absolutely covered in dust every night and they have such fun activities planned though out the whole trip. Always had the biggest smiles on their faces and were up for a great time

The guy waving? This was I believe his first Bash where the other one has done this for I think I heard somewhere between 20-30 years.

And when I saw they'd get dusty? I mean it. This was our poor Woody by the time we made it to our camp spot that evening.

We got camp set up and there was a huge fire

Dinner was a selection of meat that was so tasty I half ate it before I thought to get a picture.

They also had a live band who were AMAZING

The drive I did from lunch to our camp ground was actually pretty good. I was a bit scared about driving the car because she is a bit of a beast with no power steering, but we didn't really have any sharp turns or turns I had to do while stopped

had a couple bits that were a little nerve wracking because there was a steep cliff to one side (which I'll show a bit more later), but overall it was actually a pretty easy drive!

The other nice thing about our big car is that we actually can carry our stuff and our swags in the car itself. So when got to camp we just opened the back up and set up straight away.

If you can't carry your swag? You have to collect it from the swag truck Variety offers.

And another photo of team Rat because they were so awesome

But yeah, very convenient that we didn't have to wait in line to get our swags at night or in line to drop it off each morning. Means we were one of the first out at the start of they. Not that it's a race (we were passed often), but it was nice not waiting in line for ages

That night we also gave out a "big check" to the local community. Turns out they were trying to build a skate park to give kids a place to hang out and play together - but had stalled on getting enough funds together to build it

So Variety donated some of the money we helped raised to get the park built.

While we were having fun listening to the music and eating amazing food - we ran into a couple other teams who had also been robbed by Team Toddler. So we all got together and reported them to the Vili's Pie Patrol. Pretending they were real cops

Who then went and "arrested" the Toddlers to put them into "time out" until they gave us back our Bash Bucks

Before the "arrest" happened, one of the support cars had heard that a team of rookies had gotten robbed and ended up collecting a bunch of Bash Bucks for us.

So by the time Team Toddler approached us and said: we're good kids now to give us back our money we had even more than before we got robbed

We offered to give back the donated money, but the person who gave it to us said to keep it and have fun. (We didn't know this back then - but Bash Bucks flow like water and you get to a point where you can't get rid of them lol)

Our Jessie was so relieved. And no - we did not need the Bash Bucks for food. You really don't need them for anything. It's just stupid fun.

Ah, the power of hindsight!

I was mostly happy because (for those that may remember) all year I've been complaining about a Useless teammate who never really pulled his weight to help fund raise and at times seemed to actively sabotage me.

To the point I was worried about being in a car for 8 days with him, but turns out once he's away from work? He's great! He was a lot of fun to go on this trip with!

When we got "robbed" I braced and thought he was going to be so crappy to poor Jessie and make her feel worse, but no! He was so quick to tell her not to worry. Don't stress. It's just pretend money, let it go.

He actually goes off road-ing as a hobby so he had so much useful tips for our driving too. He was so encouraging the whole time. Never made us feel stupid if we made a mistake. I really cannot understate what a night and day difference this guy was on the trip. He really was amazing

I was feeling so much better already being on this trip with him by the end of the first night. He was willing to play along with our from then on silly rivalry we had with Team Toddler.

We were all pretty tired by the time it hit about 11pm that night (we had been up earlier than 4:30am if you recall) so while other teams were staying up to party to the live music - we all went to our swags to sleep

The weather was PERFECT. A little chilly, but as long as you had a light jumper/jacket you were comfortable. Which made sleeping in the swag with the sleeping bag the right temperature.

I had almost fallen asleep when they ended the night by shooting off some fireworks. I ended up opening my tent flap to watch them go off. The other nice thing about it being a bit cooler was that there weren't any mosquitos out just yet.

After the fireworks things settled down and we camped out at Bendleby Ranges.

We also had Channel 10 News in a car that would follow us and give updates on our progress38K views · 455 reacti... on Facebook

And that will bring us into Day 2

But as it's almost midnight and I have to work tomorrow - I will have to share the stories and photos another day.

gosh... this is something I would love to do, like a Cannonball Run or something. I've done motorcycle rides for charity, but they're usually a single day thing. Then again, Long Island isn't exactly huge. I don't know how we'd do a multi-day event unless we headed upstate or out west somewhere.

but it looks like so much fun

It was so much fun. I honestly can't begin to describe what an amazing experience. I was dreaming about it for nearly a month afterwards. It was worth all the stress from earlier in the year with the fundraising and getting ready

I won't get through all of DAY 2 tonight, but I'll at least talk a little about the morning. I got up and went to go get breakfast on my own as everyone else wanted to play with the hot water jet heater that former Useless teammate brought with him.

Moving forward I'm going to call him Woody as that was his main costume

They all wanted some coffee that should be better than what Variety would be giving out, where I don't drink coffee and don't care. So I went and got food instead.

Which personally... I feel like I made the right choice.

Also a photo of the sunrise

One with the natural light.

One with the brightness on my phone cranked as high as it would go which I just found impressive

Each night/morning they also had a poster up that they encouraged you to take a photo of each day. Gave a brief schedule for the day ahead.

I sadly don't think I saved all of them/took good photos and now I'm wishing I had. Oh well! Hindsight!

Anyway! I sat down with my food and ate quickly so I could go back to pack, but got to mingle a bit with some other teams. Like the How To Train You Dragon car who ended up being pretty good friends with us by the end of the journey.

The coolest part was when I left breakfast.

They had a large pop up tent to eat in and while I was eating I had no idea a thick fog ended up rolling in. I tried to take some video while I wandered back to our campground, but you actually see a lot more in the video than you could in real life.

The video is a bit shaky as I was legitimately getting lost in the fog because it was hard to see through it. Had to keep watching my steps.Variety SA Bash 2025 Walking Through the Fog

I even ended up getting lost and struggling to find my way back to my car Partly because one of the cars I was using as a guide point had driven off, but I cannot properly explain how thick this fog was in that moment

But! I found my way back to the group and we started out trek out of the ranges. We had a driver rotation. You spent one day as navigator for half the day and the other half as the driver. Then the next day you got to be in the "party back" and not have to worry about driving or directions!

It wasn't a hard rule as we did sometimes swap or let someone else drive a bit extra if someone wasn't feeling confident or was REALLY wanting to drive, but the idea was everyone got at least every other day to just enjoy the journey.

The four of us got on really well so there was never a fight over who was driving/navigating at all!

This was my day to relax so I got some footage of the slightly nerve wrecking drive that Jessie ended up driving us for during the morning. But oh what a view!Variety SA Bash 2025 Emerging from the FogVariety SA Bash 2025 the View from the Top

The official photographer got some amazing photos.

And got a great team photo of us all!

My phone photos weren't nearly as good as her camera was but I still love them!

After our brief photo stop it was time to hop back into the car and drive carefully to our next destination! VERY carefully!Variety SA Bash 2025 - Day 2 Drive Carefully Along t...

Which is a good place to pause for tonight as it's nearly midnight and I need to work in the morning

Whoops just realised I missed a few photos

Your phone photos are great! That's some gorgeous scenery.

We did some more driving on our way to the lunch stop for the dayVariety SA Bash 2025 Day 2

Variety SA Bash 2025 - Day 2

Variety SA Bash 2025 - Day 2 More Driving

Back to this as I finally have an evening where I'm all caught up on tags!

Lunch was held at the Blinman Hotel. Where we had some amazing pizza and an ice cream. I didn't get any photos myself here because we didn't stop for very long and were busy. First getting in line to refuel before also getting this amazing shot from the official photographer.

Seriously, she was so good. She lined us up and had us walk a short distance only twice to get this perfect team shot. Then she was off to take more photos

She got photos of the cars lined up for fuel

Some cars weren't doing as well as ours was.

This team was one of my favorites on the Bash

Everywhere we went they played up their theme of being grey nomads. Shuffling everywhere. Where we camped they put out a night stand with a glass of water with dentures in it and hung up clothing line with giant underwear hanging from it

They called everyone 'dearie' they were so nice in general (They're going to come up later in some of my story telling)

I realize I don't have any photos of the hotel itself so here's a stolen web searched one lol

We were a bit behind because of the slow driving thanks to the fog. We didn't spend long as this stop before making our way to a 'fun stop'. These stops were held where we can all gather in a group

it was always so fun seeing all the cars gathered together in our colourful convoy

This fun stop was at the Aroona Dam where some of the cars would host fun little games. Games like trying to run a mini obstacle course without spilling some wine on your shirt and carrying a plastic egg on a spoon

The theme was to honor someone's loved one who always was spilling things on his shirt

Another had one person put their head through a hole as another puts their hands through the other hole. Then tries to blindly feed the head some fairy bread.

There was another car doing a archery with a plastic bow and arrow. And Jessie got the very first (and I think only) bulleye!

And thr dam itself was also beautiful

Once we had our fun, we got back onto the road towards are final designation for the day: Leigh Creek

That really is some beautiful scenery.

And that picture is really great of the team

It is! It's one of my favorites that the photographer got!

In Leigh Creek we camped out on their oval and dinner was a selection of Indian curry. I admit, this is about the only dinner I struggled a little. I am so very white and can't handle spice. It was delicious but my mouth and stomach did not find their 'mild' to be very mild.

Although, as we set up camp for the night we were treated to probably the very best sunset I've ever witnessed

I wish I had gotten a better photo of the info board as we went through the dinner line, but I admit - we were once again in a slight hurry.

Me and Jessie had found out were the showers were. We wanted to scarf food and try to get to them before the rush. We were successful!!! But turns out there was 0 hot water.

Even though it was freezing, it felt so good to get a shower in. After we were clean we managed to get back up for the nightly announcement. That's where we found out where more of our fundraising donations were going - in Leigh creek it was helping to buy students school lunches and more school supplies.

As a kid who's parents struggled to afford our lunches and we were on a discount lunch scheme for a couple years? This one particularly touched me and made me feel so good to feel like I was helping some other kid get lunch

I actually didn't know at first when I was younger that we were on a discount plan. I was just confused once when my classmates pointed out one day that I was paying less than they were

This is just a small tangent to say - my mom is so awesome. As an adult now I am amazed by how well she did to keep most of our money troubles away from us kids for so long

After that speech, they had more local live music playing for the evening. I really don't know how some people could stay up dancing and drinking all night. Me and my group were exhausted so we went to bed and passed out.

Those swag tents were so comfortable. I was surprised by how well those thing mattresses we have in them worked.

It the morning it was a light breakfast of a muffin and some fruit. This was because we were going to go to the Farina Bakery for some 'real' breakfast

Although, before we left, the morning address by the chair stressed that we let some air out of our wheels because we were going to be on some rough terrain. Softer wheels were less likely to puncher.

The theme of the last couple days had been punctured tyres. Even if the photographer got some fun photos while people got wheels changed.

While we hadn't suffered any yet - we did lower the air pressure in ours as instructed before heading out to the bakery which has a really cool history.

Farina is a ghost town that was left to basically ruin until the restoration project start to restore/preserve the historic town.

For a couple months of the year they will turn on the old underground ovens and make baked goods the old fashion way. It's run by volunteers and all the money made goes to restoring the town

We actually just missed out on the bakery being open by about two weeks, but they were opening up special just for us! So Day 3 really got started once we arrived!

What most of us weren't expecting was team Rat getting there early to pretend to be rats caught in a giant rat trap

There were SO dedicated. They stayed "dead' and completely still for like... two hours as we all went in to get our egg and bacon sandwiches from the bakery. And it was warm that day - I bet they were sweltering in those costumes

I was a bit bummed that we only got the option for the breakfast sandwich. I would have loved to buy some of the fresh bread from the bakery or some of the sweets they had up on the menu, but alas - they didn't have any in stock

The just made the rolls for our sandwiches - but they were delicious and fluffy!

Opps forgot to post some photos from before we left Leigh Creek in the morning!

It was super cool getting to walk around the old town. And also a little haunting. Thinking about this rubble and how it use to be a town. A town that just basically... vanished. I bet the people who founded the town never expected people like us to wander through it.

During my quick run around the place for some photos and trying to stuff my face with delicious food - the news crew heard my accent and pleaded with me to give an interview. I was nervous, but said yes.

Which is how this happened:21K views | Reel by 10... on Facebook

Like any good News station - they interviewed me for about 15 minutes. Asked a lot of questions and used about 10 seconds worth

Although, sadly, it is now almost midnight and I have work in the morning. So I should head to bed. Hopefully I can get back to updating this sooner than a month next time But even if it does take a month, I'll eventually get it all out!

Ooooh!

LOL of course... I've been interviewed for things and they never even used my segment. LOL.

I guess they wanted to show the "international" appeal of the bash.

Still, though, some awesome pictures once again. Those sunset pictures are amazing.

Yeah, as the start of the questions were how long I've been in Australia, where I was from, how did I hear about the Bash

I think my answers of 13 years and through work threw them a little

hahaha

I mean, in all fairness, I don't think you really sound like you're from upstate NY anymore, but I definitely wouldn't peg you yet for Australia, either. Not completely assimilated.

Yeah, all my family say I sound weird now - especially when I use more Aussie words instead of American ones

But no one here would think I've been in Australia as long as I have either if they were just going off my accent

It was like my uncle... he got stuck somewhere between California and NY, and we'd all hear the California while the Californians always knew he from Long Island.

Stuck in the middle!