The drive back to my temporary new home in Airlie Beach, from a little suburb outside Brisbane, Moorooka, where the lovely Lola had been parked up for 6 weeks for my travel to Melbourne, was 1,200kms of heavy, heavy rain. The Bruce so overwhelmed with rain on Tuesday, near zero visibility, aqua-planning across the road (quite a feat for a fat bottomed girl), a quick detour to get off the road led me to St Lawrence and a country pub camp for the night, with my first hot meal and shower in 4 days.
Humidity was sitting in the 90% range, and the roof fan had suffered in the torrential rain and 175kph winds of Moorooka, now stuck closed. Unable to vent the humid, moist, heat from Lola the nights were sweaty, broken nightmares. A six pack of Super Crisp, a loaf of freshly baked bread and a block of Jarlsberg provided sustenance for the long road trip, along with servo coffees to start each day.
Now, home in Airlie Beach, for the next few months or so, my little world is filled with birdsong. Large white cockatoos feast on the grove of mango trees down by the creek at the back of the property, Kookaburras laugh in the morning, black cockatoos settle in the palm trees come sundown, curlews make their nightly racket, bats fly overhead, frogs and insects hum; the raucous delights of this sub-tropical paradise ever-present.
My return to Airlie was greeted with the happy faces of the shared house crew, and the three resident dogs, I have come to know and love, toasted with black Sambuca shots.
The rain has eased, the humidity comes in waves, peaking at midnight, but van windows are open and there is a breeze from the sea keeping van temperatures more manageable. An attempt to de-leaf 10cms of wet, consolidated leaf litter, twigs, deposited in the storms of Lola’s 6 week sojourn down south, bore partial success with the exception of the sludgy compost nestled under the rear barn doors. My concerns of a spider build-up in the crooks and crannies alarmingly proven correct and the rear doors were closed within moments of opening. I have yet to come up with a plan of attack to remove them swiftly enough to prevent access to the interior. Making matters worse, one of the little arachnids, fat belly bulging, appears to be pregnant.
It will take me a little while to re-acclimatise to the vagaries of the weather (particularly given the unseasonably awful weather of my Melbourne summer experience), reacquaint myself with this cruisy, laidback, beachy lifestyle, schedule the expensive and necessary repairs required for Lola, and plot out the next course of adventure heading west to Adelaide River and onward to Darwin, my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the Bearchild.
I don’t expect there will be many tales to tell in these next few months, but that gives me the opportunity to provide an update on the 60,000 or so kilometres I travelled over the last 3 years, from Queensland to the Northern Territory to Western Australia and back again. It’s been a hell of a ride!
Now, off to deal with a spider ….
charliemaybe x
Bay City Lola 