Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Travel

is about new experiences and places.
Once we drove back from Brisbane the long way, going several hundred kilometres west before turning south.
My son - about 11? 12? - complained: "We've just  been at the beach, I don't want to look at more sand."
We drove for about 700 kilometres past the Darling Downs through scrub.  Scrub, scrub, endless scrub.  No towns, no villages, no farmhouses.  Scrub.
"What do you think of the sand?" I asked him.
"It's an optical illusion,"  he said.  "Everyone knows that the interior of Australia is a desert."
The scrub was so, so boring:  one could imagine how the poor swaggies went mad walking these unchanging miles.
We stayed the night in a motel at Cunnamulla, the 4 of us sharing a room:  double bed, two singles.
During the night, like a good parent, I moved over to allow someone  in to nestle in to me.. 
Finding myself both too hot and too squashed, I started resenting the child.  Why wasn't their own bed good enough?  Which child was it?  It's feet touched mine, it was my body length, so it had to be my son.
But my face was full of a cloud of hair, so it had to be my daughter.
Yes, a woman had come into our room and climbed in to bed with us.
Oh dear.   She was drunk or drugged and heavily asleep, and not easy for my husband to get rid of.  (And yes, I do notice that although I had let her into the bed, he had the responsibility of turfing her out.  Oh dear).
We suggested to the owner, as we left, that having the same lock on each door was perhaps not the best idea.
Fussy southerners!  He took the suggestion good humoredly, in his stride.
We didn't go that way again.

2 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

And I am sure that the one lock fits all policy remains. (Unless of course mine host has changed) V lucky that she was a comatose tresspasser, and not an aggressive puker.

Frances said...

Too true on both counts, E.C.
All experience, of course.