‘So many amazing adventures, so many incredible memories!’

Published: December 28, 2022

While the festive period is traditionally a time for laughter and for joy, it can also be a time when a departed loved one is especially missed.

However, for many grey nomads who have lost their significant others in recent years, it can be incredibly comforting to have a wealth of happy shared travel memories to draw on … and a knowledge that their lives together were lived to the absolute fullest.

Certainly, that’s the case for serial adventurer, Sharon Budd.

While it was a massive shock to lose her husband, Peter, in 2015 after he suffered a brain stem haemorrhage, Sharon was in no way left with a feeling of ‘we should have done this’ or ‘why didn’t we do that’.

Outback adventures

Peter was just 62 when he died but, in their 40 years of marriage, he and Sharon packed in enough adventure to have filled a life three times as long.

And yet they began relatively late.

“We began travelling the outback highways of Australia on foot, bicycles and hitchhitching in our early 40s,” said Sharon. “And we were continually amazed and captured by the beauty of such a vast landscape.”

Peter and Sharon’s first Outback adventure was in 1994 when they took three weeks to walk and hitch from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast to Tennant Creek in the NT.

“People would stop and ask us ‘why are you two out here in the middle of nowhere on foot’?” said Sharon. “And Peter would politely reply that ‘we wanted to experience Outback Australia’.”

Peter passed away in 2015.

And experience it they did.

Over the following decades, they endured countless blisters and punctures, as well as moments of extreme exhaustion … and incredible elation.

They were constantly surprised by the kindness of strangers, by their own resilience, and by the sheer beauty of the country through which they travelled.

And, best of all, they experienced it all together.

When they eventually got to Tennant Creek on that first of many Outback adventures, Peter and Sharon picked up some casual work at the local caravan park before deciding to buy a couple of second-hand bikes from an op shop … and cycle home again!

“We slept under the stars most nights as we were often too tired to erect our lightweight cycle tent,” said Sharon. “Daily as we cycled along, with it being early Spring, we actually witnessed the magical popping up from the dry ground the most amazing brightly-coloured desert flower blooms.”

While Sharon has suffered health issues of her own in recent years, she says she still has the ‘great Aussie spirit of adventure’, and still gets out on solo camping trips in her small dome tent.

“We live in a wonderful country and there are still pockets of Oz I wish to visit that Peter and I had always planned to see if we could have retired together,” she said. “And there are also quite a few locations that I would enjoy re-visiting, and taking a walk down some memory lanes.”

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