SATURDAY 30 MAY     ST GEORGE

I was awake before 8. We were back into the morning noise of a caravan park, and people packing up for early departures.

The morning was cold – there had been a heavy dew overnight. My moccasins got wet as I went across the grass on my way for a shower, and my feet stayed cold for hours.

I drove into town to fetch the papers and read them until it was time to get ready for bowls at 12.30.

The club had one synthetic green and they had received grants of nearly $100,000 to renew it, as part of a program to encourage sports in the country. John was cross when he heard this, because our home club, which caters for a lot more people, had to fund things like that without government help. They also had poker machines here, which our club did not.

The game was a farce and a total waste of an afternoon. Most of the numbers were  family groups  of mixed ages, from toddlers who kept wandering across our rink and in amongst the bowls, to their grandmas, all drinking much beer whilst playing. They all had more fun than we did! They even smoked on the new synthetic green – no wonder they had needed a new one!

It was an extremely boring afternoon. John and I played on opposing teams. One skip was intellectually challenged and really incapable of working out any strategy or giving directions. The other skip fancied himself as the town clown. He was excruciating. It was so bad that John later actually apologized to me – unheard of. And we paid $6 each for that….

I decided I was owed about quadruple bushwalk credits for the afternoon.

After the chill of this morning, and finding out that it could get to around zero at Mitchell and Mt Moffat in winter, we had definitely abandoned the vague plans of maybe waiting around for the road into Mt Moffat to be ok. We would head north quickly, needing some tropics. More rain was possible around here too. Due to a large high sitting over Central Australia, NW Qld had recently had quite a bit of rain, and what was left was heading our way. A strange year, really.

It was a chilly night. We needed the fan heater on.