Ok. Now we're back on the northbound track! Before i get too far I want to take a second and touch on a few pending issues from previous conundrums. First off...Mayonnaise. To my complete dismay we have yet to find a suitable mayonnaise substitute and we are currently on our 4th bottle. On bottle three we thought we were on to something when, after examining the nutritional information on the back of the package, we found the one with the highest saturated fat content. Logically, even if the taste was off the delicious fat would make up for it....wrong...sooooo wrong. The second issue is that of our sweet 1980's cassette radio. In our travels we managed to happen upon a used book/cd/vhs/cassette shop and of course took the time to peruse their wares. To our delight found these rock solid statues of American music: Otis Redding, the Beatles original hits, the Eagles first album, the sound track to Rocky 1, an UNOPENED big band Christmas from 1980, and my personal favorite 1993's top dance hits. Things are looking up!!!! The unopened Christmas cassette was really something, i almost felt bad unwrapping this perfectly preserved artifact of music history. That was until about 10 seconds later when i dropped the stupid case and the little tab that holds the cover on broke off, seriously how were we able to live before mp3s????
Ok back to the fun stuff! One of the interesting stops we made along our way north was a sand dune area near the town Hawks Nest called “Dark Point.” It was interesting for two reasons. First, it was a big white (almost pure quartz) sand dune that ran along the water and second, it was a sacred Aboriginal place where for the last 4000 years they have done ritual burials and various other “tribal stuff” there and over the recent years the blowing sand has uncovered lots of artifacts from these rituals. Apparently most of which are found by people just walking along the beach. Aside from this, it was almost completely deserted. Nothing like a pure white sub-tropical beach that you can have all to yourself on a beautiful summer day...I'm jealous of these Australians!
Another kinda funny story about “Dark Point.” Like everything cool here in Australia it was 25 miles down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Now while this is not unusual for us, what was unusual was as we were trying to make our way north the road we were on made abrupt dead end into a river...ut oh! So after a little bit of “oh crap now we have to backtrack 50 miles” we saw a sign for a ferry up the road. Things were looking better. So we drive to this “ferry” to find it was basically a 50 ft long metal dock that was attached to a cable system that you parked on, paid the guy 2.50 and then he activated a big winch system that pulled the dock across the water another 40 feet to the other side. I have never even heard of such a device!!!!! But we would have gladly paid 10 times that amount to not have to drive 50 miles down dirt road in the wrong direction!
