HCC: Marshmallows + cheap wine + your best girlfriends= recipe for the perfect camping trip. After constructing a kick ass campfire (if we do say so ourselves), we settled into our foldout chairs with the mission of toasting the perfect marshmallow and catching up—since we don’t see each other enough already!
Our girl talk was quickly interrupted by a “bogan,” which is the Aussie equivalent to a “redneck.” (Hey, we’re just sharing the slang we’ve learned from the Aussies themselves). Some dude named Troy materialized out of the darkness. He sported shaggy blond hair, a beer belly and held a “stubby” (bottle of brewskie). Troy announced that he lived in a nearby trailer without electricity and cut wood for a living. Then he kindly invited us to crash with him at his place rather than sleep in our camper van. Negative, Ghost rider!
The Lost Girls tried to bring the topic of conversation into safer territory by talking about the 18 km hike we planned on doing in the national park the following morning. Troy wasn’t as slow as we thought, and quickly found another “in” by offering to come pick us up in the a.m. and drive us to the trailhead. He’d even come get us when we were done with the big trek. Um, as if we’d willingly hop into a truck with a strange man and allow him to bring us to some secluded spot where no one else knows where we are. Though it was a tempting proposition, we had no choice but to turn it down before feigning exhaustion.
The following morning our exhaustion was not an act--we were legitimately wiped out after Jen and I were awoken in terror by Amanda’s blood-curdling screams during the dead of the night. She was having nightmares that an axe-murderer was trying to break into the van in an effort to dismember defenseless foreigners. Good thing we never saw the Australian slasher cult classic “Wolfe Creek,” or else we’d all be letting out imaginations run as wild as the Outback.
Here’s a quick clip of us hanging around the campfire pre-Troy invasion. Warning: The girl talk is not all that exciting, but we wanted to show off our pyrotechnic handiwork.
--Holly
