Road trip

We are back, 'No Draaama' as they say out here, we are picking up the lingo. We think this means in English, 'I do not perceive this to be a problem at this particular junction in life, do not worry yourself unnecessarily' Oh these quirky folk, we have grown very fond of them. I wish we could cage them up and bring them all back to England with us! Why did we ever let them go in the first place.

OK, we have been out of the internet range in the back and beyond for a while now, that is why we can't post so readily, but hold up, for both yours and ours convenience... We have been keeping the blog going offline in those long warm evenings amidst the dust and desert and under the setting sun. So here is a quick copy paste for your pleasure. (Reminds me of university coursework!)

Pen date 16/09/09 Written at Oakabella homestead on the road from Geraldton to Northampton.

Recovered from the last blog posting yet?

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Anyway, enough from the sponsors, on with the story.

We left Rottnest on the 10.30am ferry, the journey took a mere 25 minutes in good weather to arrive in C shed Freemantle, where upon we boarded the 103 bus route to Perth town centre.  This is where we tried to pick up the hire car we booked only to find they had us down for the wrong day, so while George the car hire man sorted out the situation we went down to eat our pasta left overs by the river and made a friend with only one leg called Gully the Gull. Alice felt sorry for the poor chap, so tried to feed him said pasta, but as he hopped toward it he was overpowered by a more legged dominant gull friend we named jake. Which we think is a good metaphor for the current economic situation. Poor Gully.

Went back to George who showered us with maps and pleasantly surprised us with a white Nissan Tiinda we have named Germaine. George spent a good ten minutes expertly explaining the way to the highway showing us on all his maps, and as he waved us off Gareth drove deliberately in the wrong direction smiling.

Having doubled back on ourselves we hit highway 1 and with only a brief stop in Woolworths which Alice needed a large chocolate cake to recover from (Aus super markets don’t seem to have any 2 for 1 deals = unhappy Gareth) we arrived 2 hours later in Dandaragan. Which Gareth only knows as Dan the Dragon.  We made friends with a couple originally from Oxford who lent us an extension cable so we could use the mac (= happy Gareth) and cooked the reduced burgers we’d bought from Woolworths.  In the morning Alice had to be quite stern with Gareth who was tyring to drive off without putting campsite fee in honesty box, she then walked into a post and bruised her head, that’s called anti karma, the long lost relative of karma.

We were going to head to Cervantes and the Pinnacles in Nambung but after chatting to a silver nomad (more on that later) we decided to head inland first to see the wild flowers so headed east to Moora then North to Morawa.  The roads are long with red tracks careering off to the right and left! They’re also deserted and bizarrely dotted with ‘children crossing’ signs even though there’s no sign of any dwellings let alone children!  Gareth has decided that they’re children of the corn signs, this is a geek joke that Alice doesn’t understand.  Gareth adds ‘not a very good joke either’

We have also mastered the ‘car wave’, we have realized that seen as there’s so few cars on the road everyone concerned gets pretty excited when two vehicles pass each other and they wave (that’s our theory anyway).  Our waves have become gradually more elaborate, Gareth has added a few salutes (including a Rimmer salute) and at least one royal wave.  Conversely Gareth gets pretty annoyed if the other person doesn’t wave and wont cheer up until he’s distracted by the next person waving or road kill, which is quite common.

On arriving in Morawa we visited tourist information (more maps!) and headed off to look for wild flowers which are pretty amazing.  It’s really green at the moment (what with all the rain!) and the earth is a deep red then there’s just these patches of bright colour which makes for some pretty special scenery.

  

Flowers Iris View

Back at the campsite we couldn’t pitch because of a torrential down poor so we stood in the laundry and did our washing while various other campsite inhabitants (all caravaners) umm’d and ahh’d about our predicament.  Which brings me back to the silver nomads.  As we’re hitting the campsites we’re often surrounded by ladies and gentleman of the caravan touring generation.  They are frequently astonished and fairly amused by our tent and more than once we’ve had to pitch in the dark after being delayed by a long, but very interesting, conversation with ‘Mike and Lynn’ who thought they’d met an Englishman once when they were farming their 1 trillion acres in Queensland in the 70’s and who’s Mother / Father / brother / Uncle / Baker lived in Kent.  Alice is often trapped in the ladies toilets chatting away, as is Gareth but the conversation doesn’t always go as well.

They also bestow on us more maps and lots of sound (and often contradictory) advice about where to go next.  But they are all united in one opinion, and that is that it hasn’t rained this much in WA in years. The farmers are loving it though.

When the rain let up a bit we pitched our tent and thankfully this morning the weather had improved considerably.  Ten hours later we took it back down again!

Today we have driven up through Mullewa where we went on a bush trail and saw our first kangaroos!!  No pics unfortunately as those killeroo’s were pretty fast and far away, but we did get pictures of a legless camel Gareth spotted just sitting in a field! 

After that on to Geraldton where we spent two and a half hours in Macdonalds booking the cheapest flights possible to Melbourne, up loading the last two blog posts and checking e-mails. 

We are now at Oakabella homestead under the southern stars, sitting outside next to the little shop they have here. We have just cooked a pretty eventful dinner!  Gareth decided it would be a good idea to try Kerosene in the cooking stove instead of methylated spirits.  Alice asked him if he was sure but assured her that it would cook things faster and was pretty excited.  Little did Alice know that it had the potential to cook the whole of Oakabella homestead faster but she soon found out when after about five minutes of burning the Kerosene reached ignition point and the camping stove blew up in a ball of flame burning the strap and nearly setting the table cloth on fire!  Not wanting to alert the whole campsite to our little mistake we then hopped about trying to get the lid on the burner and put the flames out. So three days after buying a stove for our anniversary, Gareth has already pushed it to the max and burnt all the straps, and covered it in black soot. Which we think is a good metaphor for the current Afghanistan situation. Poor camp stove.

Carry on Blogging.

Blog on!

A and G xx