Ice Cream in July

The batteries were down near fifty percent, and it was our own fault.

We had missed gas on the last resupply. No gas means no stovetop, which means the induction hob and the air fryer do all the cooking, and those two things pull more power than everything else in the bus put together. In January that would not have mattered. In late July, with the sun barely getting above the hills and giving up by four, the panels could not make back what the cooking was taking. Three days of that and the numbers had gone somewhere we did not like.

So we went south rather than north, back past Coles Bay to the National Park RV stop, which we had used once before for exactly this reason. Paid for a night. Plugged in.

Then sat there while it charged.

A large battery bank takes hours to come back up from half, and there is nothing to do during those hours except be present in a car park and watch a number climb. It is a dull way to spend a day and it is entirely the correct decision, which does not make it less dull. We had a working solution, a paid site, a cord running out of the bus, and a strong desire to be anywhere else.

By the time it was full the day was mostly gone. We turned north again, rejoining the route we had left, and got maybe forty minutes up the road before the light went.

A sign came up for the Pondering Frog Café, which offered free camping and had good reviews and a name that made the decision for us. We pulled in as it was going properly dark.

Something we had both noticed that week: the evenings were lasting longer. Five weeks past the solstice and it was measurable, twenty minutes or so of extra light at the end of the day, which does not sound like much until you have spent a winter arranging your entire life around when the sun leaves. Cooking in the dark, walking in the dark, deciding at three in the afternoon whether there was time to get anywhere. It was starting to loosen. Summer in this state, when it comes, gives you until nine at night, and we were beginning to look forward to it.

The café was still open, so we went in and had ice cream, in July, in Tasmania, in the cold, which is the correct time to have ice cream and requires no defence.

Then back to the bus, and we watched television. Several episodes of it. The heater on, screens up, the door shut against the dark, doing precisely what anybody in a house would have been doing at that hour on a Friday night.

The frogs started up not long after. The place is named for them and they earn it, a steady racket from the water somewhere behind the café that went on the entire night and which neither of us minded in the slightest.Read more