2009-11-29 -19 146

Townsville, Australia, 2009-11-29

Location

Out near Woodstock, a couple of hundred metres on the north side of the Giru-Woodstock Road.

Participants

Matty K and family

Matty K's Expedition

Success!

We traveled by road for most of the forty-odd kilometres, then pulled over in a shallow ditch on the side of the road and parked the car.

Hurdle #1: a barbed wire fence. I delicately hurled the pram over, then even more delicately lowered the girls over into it. Then I climbed through myself, and voilà! Hurdle #1 .. er .. hurdled.

We strolled through the cow pasture.. er, that's what they're called, right? A place where cows had walked when the ground was muddy, back in the dinosaur era, so now it's like a bunch of deep cow hoof-prints in the concrete-like baked clay. Trapping the wheels of hapless prams, attempting to twist ankles, and such. Oh, also lots of cow poo (mostly dry).

Anyway, yeah, we crossed about fifty metres of that, circling a great big humming powerline tower thingy. And then...

Hurdle #2: a ruddy great chasm. Okay, a dry creekbed. But when you're pushing a pram full of your progeny, it amounts to the same thing. So we wandered along the edge of that, following the cow trails, until we found a ford. Is it called a ford if there's no water? I dunno. Anyway, the sides were sloped nice and shallowly and it looked like vehicular access was possible. So I dragged the pram across and up the far bank. Voilà again.

Then we walked another hundred and fifty metres or so, towards a great mound of cleared scrub (trees and whatnot that had been heaped up into a huge pile). I was afraid the satellites would try to claim that the hash point was in there, but fortunately we found it just beside. Photography ensued.

Then, we retraced our steps, but in the other direction, back across the paddock, over the ford thing, around the power pole thing, over the fence, and back to the car. And then I noticed that the lens cap of the camera was missing. Argh.

So, being such a wonderful father, I put the girls in the car and turned it on (for the air-conditioner) and abandoned them on the side of the road in the outback. I ran back to look for the stupid lens cap: through the fence, along the creek, over the ford, towards the scraggy woodpile, all the while scanning the ground like a ranger searching for signs of hobbits amongst the debris of an overnight battle between orcs and horsemen w..er..wait what was I saying? Oh yeah, looking for the lens cap. And you know what? I found it! The whole starlight filter had unscrewed itself and fallen out of the pram (lens cap and all). So I picked it up, and turned and ran back to the creek, across the ford, around the power pole, through the fence, and into the car.

Then we drove home, the long way.