Helter Shelter

This is an image of a shelter shed in a park not far from where we live.  It's a composition from thirty-one different viewpoints and a version of it enjoyed some success in my camera club's end of year competition "in the style of Catalan artist, Pep Ventosa".

I like to think it serves to illustrate the way social media affects our view on life.  

Even things which are very clear and obvious can be obscured and appear to be something they are not if enough slightly different points of view are overlaid over the one true image. 

If one is not careful, one can find oneself spinning off in an entirely different direction to that intended, on a path filled with blurred half-truths and mis-direction.

May your 2022 be filled with focus and entirely devoid of social media "research"!

Lockdown (and out.)

 It was a bit of an anticlimax after all that, to be returning into a lockdown zone.  Those last few hundred kilometres were quite bizarre in the absence of any traffic, with those escapees long gone to places further north.

Quite coincidentally this story ends on the eve of a new year as we learn to deal with our first real wave of Covid, "living with" it as we are often reminded.

In the intervening period, we haven't completed the van, we have enjoyed a few short times away which were enjoyable but quite  unremarkable.   We lost a mother of course, and somehow remained stupidly busy working on other projects.

This journey will continue, that road south is open now and in a few weeks we might even be able to return should we dare leave our state.  Whether the next leg is to be reported as it unfolds or as a retrospective as has been this case, we won't know until it begins, but you will know as soon as we do.

Stay tuned, as they say, for the next exciting episode, or if you wish, for a few that will be quite dull as we clear our decks and minds for the road ahead.

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One last beachside lunch

 We were with Chris and Phil under a clear blue sky, the biggest worry we had was to decide what kind of fish we'd have with our chips for lunch, when the call came, and with it the photographs of highways filled with "escaping" vehicles.

Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast had a small Covid outbreak, and had been placed into Lockdown.

One would think, in that situation, where the risk of catching a sometimes fatal disease was high, that the majority of people would knuckle down, lock themselves in, and minimise their risk.   To their credit that's what the majority of people did.

However, a small minority, enough to fill two lanes of highway heading out of town, apparently decided that they would be better off living out of the lockdown zone, and if they had been exposed to the virus they were more than happy to assist in its distribution into the wider community by going on holiday.

At that point, unvaccinated and feeling quite vulnerable, it was not difficult to decide that we'd be safer in our own home in a community with minimal transmission than taking our chances with these ill-intentioned refugees.

The only decision we could take was to curtail the rest of our planned journey, and return to base.

One last roadside coffee

There's nothing that makes ordinary coffee taste better than boiling the water on a fire made of actual wood scavenged from the great outdoors.   It may or may not be a psychological phenomena, like wood fired pizza, and since there doesn't seem to be any peer reviewed scientific research into this, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Sadly it's not terribly polite to fire up the bonfire (or even the Kelly Kettle) in the middle of a park downtown, even if it's a very small town like Miriam Vale, but the Butane stove does a job that's almost comparable.  

There are rumblings of an outbreak "down south" so we boiled the water a bit longer than usual "just in case" and started to consider staying somewhere until the dust settled.

Our plan begins to unravel.

We hadn't planned this to be the last night either.

The PLAN, was to drop in on Chris and Phil in Bargara for a few days, spend a few nights in a bedroom that didn't have sliding door that went "grrrrrrrrthunk" every time one of us got up in the middle of the night, before resuming our beach crawl south.

If we tried hard enough those last few hundred kilometres might even take a month.

We were having a lovely time it must be said, making our plans (there's that word again) to drop in at home for a bit, finish the finer detailing on the van, and then, at our earliest opportunity complete the second half of this particular adventure.  We had decided that we'd just keep going (more or less) until we reached the psouthern-most part of Tasmania. 

There were stumbling blocks of course, the fact that we'd have to cross three states all of which had closed borders was one of them and that once we had left our own we would not be able to return under any circumstance was another.  

It would only be a matter of days before we would be reminded of our biggest mistake:

We hadn't travelled for so long, we had forgotten our cardinal rule.

NEVER HAVE A PLAN.

One last beachside campsite

At the time we couldn't have known that the little caravan park at Armstrong Beach was to be our last beachside campsite for this trip.   

We would not have done anything differently had we known, but I've managed now to fill two paragraphs without the need to describe in detail the "nothing" we did all afternoon while the water lapped metres from our repose.

We found it quite by accident which is absolutely the best way of finding things of course, and it was chock-a-block full, not a space left sorry, booked out for months in advance.  At a time when every caravan that ever there was was running round in circles looking for somewhere to stay this story had repeated itself all the way down the coast since Cooktown.

Fortunately we had become very adept at looking quite sad and disappointed, and equally fortunately each time we have met kind and amenable proprietors who after taking a look at our "tiny" van, always seem to find a spot "if it's just for one night and we don't need power".

We have discovered that between sites 24 and 25 in every caravan park, not shown on the site map, but there none the less, is "site 24A".  Sometimes a nice person has to move his car to reveal it, because it's exactly the size of a parked car as luck would have it, but it's been there all the time and we are always delighted when it appears as indeed we were this night.

We interrupt this story to wish you a Merry Christmas!

Nothing says “it’s Christmas” in Australia more than a ceramic gingerbread star with frosting doing an impersonation of melting snow and a plum pudding hanging in the middle of it,

… so Merry Christmas!