He quit the rat race to travel and write – and boy did it pay off

John Ahern had a high-flying corporate career but chucked it all in for a campervan and quality time on the road with family – and then spun it into an award-winning book

JOHN Ahern steps out the front door of his house in the idyllic surrounds of the Currumbin Valley, his head buzzing as he grapples with a dilemma only an Aussie author would encounter.

His book, On The Road … With Kids, has been travelling well in Australia and New Zealand with publisher Pan Macmillan, which also owns the global digital rights. It also happened to win the People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year award this month.

But he’s yet to crack the UK market where another publisher has just picked up the rights to publish in book form.

So here is his dilemma. Summersdale, which specialises in the travel and lifestyle genre, wants him to re-edit the book and that means removing Aussie words and slang that would leave the Poms looking like stunned mullets.

“Did you know ‘spruiker’ is Australian and so the word has to be removed?’’ Ahern says.

“The same with huntsman spider. I’ve had to find its technical description. The generic term is giant crab-spider.’’

But what has a huntsman spider got to do with a book about walking away from the corporate world, packing up the family, flying to Amsterdam, buying an old van sight unseen on the internet and embarking on a year-long journey across Europe and into northern Africa?

Ahern took a redundancy from his senior position with Flight Centre back in 2005. He was on a management team of global executives and was responsible for mergers and acquisitions, travelling four to five months of the year.

“Even when I was home, I wasn’t mentally home,’’ he says, by this time in the kitchen of his Currumbin haven where he’s rummaging around on a shelf, digging out a coffee jar.

“The book starts with me bursting two discs in my back and having one of those ‘is this it?’ life moments. I couldn’t even smash the spiders around home – that was my job as dad – because my back was so bad. That’s where the huntsman comes in.’’

Ahern was in a boardroom meeting one day and realised work had become his life. He was missing out on a lot with wife Mandy and his children, Jaimie and Callum, who were aged four and two at the time. Mandy works in management leadership and human resources counselling, and has written two books in her field.

“Flight Centre was doing a raft of redundancies,’’ he says.

“I’d had an unrequited dream of getting into a camper van and driving,” he tells Coast Weekend.

“You wake up one day and you think what is life about, bigger cars and houses? What are we waiting for?’’

With the kids yet to start school and Mandy willing to toss in work and take off on a European adventure crammed in a van, Ahern left his job and they set off on a trip that would take them to 30 countries.

They journeyed up to the Arctic Circle, back down through eastern Europe, across to Spain and Portugal, down to Morocco and then back into Europe and across to Greece and Turkey before doing a U-turn once more and driving to Germany for the World Cup in 2006.

“The first month was tough,’’ he says, recalling a family packed into a van that they were still trying to operate properly.

Ahern was coming to terms with leaving his job and was suffering almighty pain with his back. Using the clutch in the van was playing havoc with his sciatic nerve, so Mandy became the driver.

“There was me carrying on, swearing at people,’’ he says.

“The first month was what I call the hell reality of camping. It was a combination of lost job, my back, an e-tox (they had given up the internet) and we didn’t have a clue how to work the van.

“It blew up in Zagreb and cost a thousand euros to fix. We had to get parts flown into Croatia. After that, it was mechanically perfect.’’

The children are now aged 14 and 12, and do not have the recall an adult would of such an epic journey.

“But they do have memories of bunk beds in the van that were like cubby houses, riding camels into the desert in Morocco, the underground cities of Turkey where you go down eight storeys through tunnels and caverns.’’ Ahern did not keep a diary. When his wife and friends suggested he should write a book about the European adventure, he had a much better resource – letters of up to 40 pages long that he wrote home to his mother in Redcliffe.

“They were the best form of diary,’’ he says. “I had some photos and memories, but the letters were fantastic. They helped me get back into the ‘now’.’’

Ahern has started a second book and is agonising whether it should be fiction or nonfiction. The skeleton of it is his journey into Africa as a backpacker in the 1990s.

“I ended up being drugged, hospitalised and asked to be a witness at a capital punishment trial,’’ he says.

Ahern admits to breaking a basic rule of backpacking – he accepted a chocolate from a stranger on a bus. It had been laced with drugs to knock him out so the stranger could steal his gear. The dose was so large he was senseless for days.

The other passengers on the bus were furious and were beating up the thief when Kenyan police arrived.

Ahern says the man’s offence was a capital crime in a region that relied on tourists to survive.

What happened to him and what role Ahern played will be revealed once the writer thrashes out which would make the better read – a factual account of that incident and the broader experience with Kenyan culture, or a fictional thriller.