Coffee, Community, and Cozy Nights

Deloraine had what we needed, which was sunlight and a post office. The batteries had come off the Honeycomb Caves camp in poor shape and the panels wanted open sky, so a couple of days in town was less a choice than an arrangement with the weather.

Two parcels went out from the counter. One of them was the small gimbal camera, which had been playing up for a while and was still, mercifully, inside its warranty. The woman serving us was called Leanne, and she got about four sentences in before the questions started. Where had we come from, how long had we been out, was it really a bus, did we ever get sick of each other. She had that quality some people behind counters have of being interested rather than polite, and she took our details so she could follow along afterwards. Then, unprompted, she told us where the coffee was.

We walked the six hundred metres up the main street to find it. Deloraine is a working town rather than a pretty one, though it has the Meander River running through the middle of it and a run of old buildings that have survived by continuing to be useful. The coffee house was busy, warm, and loud in the way that a small town's good café is loud on a weekday morning, half the room known to the other half. The coffee was worth the walk and worth the recommendation.

There is a specific pleasure in a stranger telling you where to go and being right. It is such a small transaction. Leanne got nothing out of it. But it is the thing that makes a town legible when you have no reason to know anything about it, and after five months of pulling into places we had never heard of, we had come to rely on it more than we expected.

From there it was twenty minutes to Westbury, which we had passed through back in March for a parcel and not properly seen. It is not the sort of place we usually aim for. There is no view to speak of, no water, no walk that goes anywhere. What Westbury has is a green with an English feel to it, a maze that draws tourists in summer, and a free stopover for travellers, which is a genuinely generous thing for a small town to offer and which costs it something.

So we bought coffee there too. That was the whole of our thinking. A town lets you park for nothing, you put money over its counters, and the arrangement stays worth making for the next people through. It is not charity in either direction. It is just how a place and the people passing through it stay on good terms.

Two nights, then. The panels did their slow work through the daylight, the numbers on the monitor climbing back toward something we could leave with. We drank coffee, walked the green, and did the small resupply jobs that accumulate and then all want doing at once.

It was ordinary, and we noticed the ordinariness more than usual. Three nights earlier the sky had come apart over the Great Western Tiers and Sal had stood in the wet grass crying at something she had wanted to see since she was small. Now we were in a car park in Westbury watching a battery percentage go up. Both were the same trip. That is the part nobody tells you: the enormous nights and the flat ones run on exactly the same fuel, and the flat ones are what buy you the enormous ones. The panels needed the sun. The sun needed us to sit still. So we sat still.

Launceston was next, and the mechanic, and whatever the bus turned out to need.Read more