Day 122 - Celebrate the unexpected

-
Alpha to a wild camp, approx 10km west of Jericho 69km

OMG, it was damn cold this morning.  Woke up at 0530, the BOM tells me it's 1C.  To be honest all the bits not in the sleeping bag told me that too.  Kerstin, always far braver than me rolls out of bed with first light, and lovely woman that she is, gets last night's campfire going again.  Enough warmth to enjoy breakfast while standing as close as possible to the fire.



We hope to ride a bit further than Jericho this afternoon, just so long as we have the legs and the water for the job.  It's not looking so good for this plan for the first forty kms.  It looks relatively flat, but it feels like we are doing a fair amount of climbing.  We enjoy a brief distraction from the relentless grind when we spot a pair of Red tailed black cockatoos large, noisy and spectacular red and orange banded tails, a rare sight for those of us from southern states.

We finally get an answer to why there was so much deceptive climbing today, we are crossing the Great Dividing Range (again!).  Call me a geography failure but I always thought the Great Dividing Range was further east.  Today's trivia question, bought to you by Queensland Roads is "What does the Great Dividing Range divide?"  We can't be too terrible at geography, we knew the answer to this one! 

There's a hint in the picture...


The information centre in Jericho offers an opportunity to refill all our water bottles, so we push a bit further out of town, on the lookout for a sneaky wild camping site, far enough off the hwy for privacy and quiet.  Another 12kms and we find a good spot, wheeling the bikes off into the scrub.  There's enough of the day left for setting up and the all important collection of firewood as its supposed to be even colder tonight!



Sometimes it's obvious that Kerstin and I were destined.  Who else but us would build a perfect fire ring and then divide the wood collected by size.  If she could she'd make a campfire spreadsheet!  As soon as the sun sets we are glad for our fire, and spend a tranquil evening gazing into the flames, drinking whiskey from the flask and making s'mores. 



The answer : It divides the flow of water.

Location: Jericho QLD 4728, Australia

Comments

  1. FrancieJune 12, 2022 at 3:30 PM

    Drinking whiskey by an open fire - bliss. Like the Trivia initiative.

    ReplyDelete
  2. FrancieJune 12, 2022 at 3:39 PM

    Can 'match' your 1 degree with Watching three games of soccer [National Girls Championships] in Geelong. About 11.12 but standing/sitting in the wind, then a shower was freezing. But caught up with Stewart, Jan and Chuck. And Brenda and Becky travelled down as well, so all good.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for sharing! We read all the comments, replies depend on internet connection and energy levels.

Popular posts from this blog

Accidents happen

-
Image
It's slow going writing this particular blog post as I am doing it with only one functional hand.  After almost 7000kms on the bikes, injury found me while running.   I wish I had a fantastic story to tell, but I simply tripped on a rocky trail and fell over.  You know that meme that goes "If you want to know if you're old fall over.   If people laugh you're still young,  if people panic then you're old!"  I can confirm, I am definitely old! It probably didn't help that two of my fingers were quite obviously either dislocated, broken or both.   I begged Kerstin to remove my wedding ring before the finger started swelling, being three hours from the hospital I was imagining the worst case scenario of the ring tourniqueting my finger and its subsequent death and amputation.  Poor Kerstin, this kind of thing makes her faint, but she gritted her teeth and pulled off the ring.  I then gritted my teeth and asked the ex-army maintenan...
Read more

Learning a new language

-
Image
There's plenty of things I anticipated learning when we accepted the positions at Avon Downs.  I thought I'd learn a lot about cooking for groups, about different cuts of beef and how to prepare them.  Maybe some stuff around the logistics of running a community which is 260km from the closest centre, and even then, its still Mt Isa... But I didn't really expect to learn a new language.  To be fair, I haven't spent a lot of time in the Territory.  But they really do speak their own dialect here.  Much different from costal Queensland, which is a slower, relaxed kind of Australian drawl.  Here it's fast, brief and usually mumbled.  I think I spent the first month constantly asking people to repeat themselves, answering the phone is always a diabolical risk.  And trying to understand the radio chat, impossible! Then there is all the slang and local shorthand.  To be fair some of the slang I suspect has been created by the Ringers themselves, as...
Read more

Don't be a fish; be a frog!

-
Image
I recently took a phone call from one of the ringer's mums. Not quite sure whether she had dialed the right number, she asked "are you the new cook?" and I replied "I am the other half that came with the new cook, I am more the (kitchen's) helping hand". We then continued to have a lovely chat. She was kind enough to enquire whether we are settling in okay and then she asked "are there still frogs in the toilets?"  Ha! I laughed out loud. I told her that almost every toilet we have cleaned on the station so far has come with a "froggy" surprise. Fortunately, they don't make themselves known while you are "in business" but once you proceed to the flushing part of your toilet visit, they jump or slip-and-slide into your vision. God knows how they get into the system in the first place, but once they are in there, they are hard to get out. This is not so much of a worry if they reside in the staff toilets. But when it comes to ...
Read more