Anna had another heavy day of climbing but she just seems to get fitter and happier every day. We are camped in a gravel pit at the junction of Highway 61 and the Savannah Way which we will turn onto tomorrow. It will eventually take us through to Normanton which is the furthest North we’ll go whilst in Qld. I plan to ignore the crocodiles and dip a toe into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
For Spike and me, today was relatively unremarkable. Everything went according to plan. I have developed the habit of checking everything multiple times and finally walking around the van and truck before heading off. Today I discovered that I had left the grey-water drain hose attached! If I had’ve driven off it would only have been a mini-disaster but it certainly would have looked stupid and would’ve pissed me off for days. It’s surprising how much there is to remember when packing up and how easy it is (for me anyway) to forget little bits of it. We caught up with Anna about 50ks from the end and gave her a drink and some encouragement and then went on to circle the wagons.
Gravel Pits are not salubrious but they tend to be sparsely populated and there are no caravan park police constantly telling me to put Spikey Boy on the lead, which I do until they have gone off to enforce their rules on some other poor bastard. Spike has no intention of going anywhere and mostly sleeps under the van. These days he’s a model dog.
I was chatting to a bloke who has just taken his Jayco caravan up Cape York to the top. He said it absolutely filled up with dust and it took him a day to clean it out. Jaycos are notoriously built to a budget. They have vents and that’s where the dust gets in. Our van has rubber seals around every possible ingress opportunity for dust and it seems, so far, to work extremely well.
There’s another old bloke camped out of the back of a Ute in our gravel pit. He would be about 80 I reckon. He says he left Victoria in January and told the kids he’d be back for Christmas. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of single old men who live as “permanents” in the various caravan parks, or are constantly on the road. I don’t know exactly what drives this but I assume a dead or departed wife and a cheap way to live. Anyway, there is a remarkable number of them.
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Ha ha, you’re surely joking but please don’t put a toe in the Gulf of Carpentaria, you’ll be mistaken for a silly German tourist if you do…have you noticed that the crocodile warning signs only say “achtung”, that’s German for “warning/watch out” because it’s usually Germans who take a swim or get too close to the edge in crocodile waters. Crocodiles are creatures of great stealth who can stay hidden underwater for hours waiting for some dumb creature to get too close to the edge of the water and then they attack with huge strength and velocity.
Interesting about the single old men, being a single old man myself. Living out there like that is peaceful, mostly. I think that’s the quest – a peaceful existence, in Nature if at all possible, within a budget.