Bunnings, Burgers & Bus Adventures

Launceston in the cold, three degrees, and a list.

Bunnings first, which after seven months has become a genuinely enjoyable stop rather than a chore. There is always something the bus needs: a bracket, a fitting, a length of something. You walk the aisles looking at solutions to problems you have and problems you might one day have, and you come out with a small bag and a project.

Then the supermarket, and then, because the day had that feeling about it, McDonald's.

That is worth defending. We cook nearly everything we eat, from scratch, in a small kitchen, and it is good food and we like doing it. Which is exactly why a paper bag of burgers eaten in the front seats of a parked bus registers as an event. Novelty is relative. Ours had become a Big Mac in a car park in Launceston.

Then out to Honeysuckle Banks at Evandale, five minutes from the airport, because Anth had a flight to Melbourne that evening.

We set up quickly, knowing we would be leaving again within the hour, and then drove to departures. Neither of us was in a hurry to get out of the vehicle. It was one night, he would be back the following afternoon, and it was still the sort of goodbye where both people wait for the other one to move first. Then a hug at the drop-off and he went in.

Sal drove the five minutes back to camp on her own.

Here is the thing. Anth had stayed at that exact camp a month earlier, alone, on the night Sal flew to Queensland. He had lain there listening to freight trains going through in the dark and aircraft coming over on approach and thought it was one of the more restful sounds available, gone straight to sleep, and thought as he did that Sal would have hated it.

She hated it.

The trains came through and she felt them in the bed. Headlights swept the windows every time a vehicle came in or left. Aircraft went over on the approach path all evening and again early. She sleeps lightly and notices everything, and a camp with three separate sources of interruption is not a camp, it is a night spent waking up. She got very little and was up at dawn feeling every hour of it.

He had known that would happen. He had known it from the other side of the country, a month before, lying in the same spot enjoying himself.

In Melbourne, Anth's night was not much better in its own way. The flight was delayed, then delayed again, then again, and he spent hours in an airport doing what everybody does in that situation: sitting under fluorescent lights on a chair designed to be sat on briefly, watching a board. It was near midnight when he finally got to Blake's place and onto the couch, which was a considerably better offer than a hostel and considerably cheaper than a hotel, and he took it gratefully and slept badly anyway.

He was back at Evandale the following afternoon, and climbing into the bus after twenty-four hours in airports and someone else's living room was the best part of the trip.

We stayed one more night at Evandale, which Sal endured for the second time and did not enjoy any more than the first, and in the morning turned north for the highlands and Penstock again.

There was still snow up there somewhere. We had not given up on it.Read more