Day One. From Howard to Gayndah. “To infinity and beyond.”
So, we have left on our Big Yellow-themed Bus journey. Starting in Qld, who knows where we will end up?
We left with a flurry of tears, waves goodbye from Paul & Natawan & the paparazzi clicking away. Well, Dad was anyway...
Within 45 minutes of being on the road, an oncoming travel vehicle proclaimed joyfully with its signage, Adventure Before Dementia. Excellent. I guess we are doing the same.
We stopped at Childers in order to buy 2 things – cotton buds (I can’t survive even a night without them. In fact, a couple of months ago I was suffering with vertigo and went to the doctor, when she looked into my Eustachian tubes she couldn’t help but exclaim at their cleanliness. True story) and batteries for the 2 way radio. Copy that. When we reached the checkout, Dave realised he didn’t have his eftpos card. I searched my wallet. I didn’t have mine either. Had we been robbed? Surely not. I paid with cash and as we skittered nervously back to the bus, we mentally backtracked. I had last had the cards (yes, plural). I had them 2 nights previously when I went to Torbanlea pub for a goodbye dinner with ‘the girls’. (Hello Margaret, Rhonda, Fay & Cheryl). When I jumped on the bus I found the mischievous missing cards. They were in my ‘other handbag’. Of course!
Needless to say, when we came out of the IGA, we had the 6 required AAA batteries and a pile of other bus adventure supplies, sans cotton buds. What a great start to the trip. Dementia? Who said anything about dementia? (That was our mini IGA Dementia-Adventure within an adventure).
Before leaving Childers, we went to the memorial for the people who died in the deliberately lit fire at the Palace Backpackers Hostel in 2000. 15 backpackers died. There is a very moving photographic display of all of them. It was a sombre reminder that we should all make the most of life.
All aboard! At Biggenden we saw the gorgeously craggy Mt. Walsh which reaches a height of 645m. It made me wonder at what height a mountain is a mountain and not a hill. Hmmm... Can anyone enlighten me?
We crossed Plum Creek and many others where you could see the amount of rain that had passed through them recently. Long grasses & small trees were pushed down from the force of the water. As we drove through a valley of luminous green, we saw one tractor that was bogged and abandoned and a ute with an ultra light aircraft on the tray.
When we arrived on the outskirts of Gayndah, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had a Big Orange! And one must take photos of Big Things in Australia, mustn’t one? So I leaped in front of the Big Orange like a drongo and Dave snapped away. We stopped at the rest area across the road and I saw a mountain dragon lizard. I called Dave over for a look and he spotted behind me, what he thought was a dead baby possum. On closer inspection, we discovered it was actually a sugar glider and he was still breathing. His little chest was gently rising and falling. The poor little fella probably fell from the tree or misjudged his gliding distance. He was lying on his back and he looked a bit crooked. We got a calico bag from the car and Dave gently scooped him into it. Even though his eyes remained closed, while Dave was trying to lift him, the little fella was gripping onto some long blades of grass, trying to stay put. I broke off the grass and little Samuel Sugar Glider was placed into the calico bag along with the grass firmly in his grip.
We hopped back in the bus (Vic was none the wiser that there was another furry creature in her yellow home or at least, she didn’t show it), hoping to find a vet in town. And just like magic, there was a lovely white wooden cottage about 200 metres up the road. And inside the cottage was Nathan, the new vet who is taking over the practice at the end of the month. Nathan took Samuel Sugar Glider out of his pouch-like bag and held him up by the tail. Just as he was saying how these little critters sleep pretty heavily during the day, Samuel woke up for a couple of startled seconds and gripped Nathan’s finger and wrapped the tip of his tail around my finger. Unfortunately though, he possibly has spinal damage. We left our furry friend with promises of checking up on him in a few days. Nathan has no internet but fridge magnets with the phone number were arriving soon. We told him we’d look him up.
Dave went on the job hunt. He spoke to Sarina Russo who sent him to the local caravan park. Everyone had been so friendly and by 7pm Dave received a phone call to say that he was to start work picking lemons on Wednesday! Too easy !
We ended up staying the night in the same rest area for the night, under a big fig tree wondering which semi trailer was going to careen into us. We met a friendly, chatty man who lived nearby, a lovely bearded yet moustache-less man who extolled to us the virtues of all the water catchment areas in the vicinity. And there are a lot! It was quite a chat! He had a blind Staffy with him whom Vic sniffed and then ignored. Because he had been so full of knowledge, I asked him if he knew where M&T’s Country Kitchen was. It is owned by our friend Margaret’s sister. He told us where it was and also that her name is Tanya, a vital fact that I was missing. (That would be the T in M&T. Excellent).
Before it was time to tuck ourselves in for our first night on the road, I headed off, torch in hand to the water toilet at the end of the road stop area to spend a penny. Little did I know, I was in for yet one more encounter with nature. When I flushed, a giant frog’s leg, slid down the inside of the toilet bowl from its hidey spot under the lip. I nearly jumped out of my skin. But Mr. Australian Green Tree Frog wasn’t at all perturbed. He just pulled his leg back up and out of sight again so that the next toilet user would be just as unaware as I was, sitting on the loo.
And so, Dave and I pulled the curtains on our Little Yellow Bus (or Big Yellow Bus, depending on which way you look at it) and snuggled up on the futon for our first night in Australia’s Adventureland Dementialand.
