So many blogs about the road trip. At this point I'm not even sure it y'all are reading them anymore. I promise, after Sunday, there isn't much left to talk about.
Saturday night was my turn to sleep in the top bed. From the "mattress" to the ceiling of the van there is probably about a foot and a half of space (just enough room to wiggle into your sleeping bag and then be able to roll over). When my alarm went off at 6:30 Sunday morning I instinctively sat up to try to find it, and bashed my head on the roof of the van. Then, I looked towards my feet and saw only black and panicked because I couldn't remember where I was. Thankfully, it didn't take too long to remember that I was in the top bed and I saved myself from hitting my head a second time.
We had packed all of our bags the night before, so Sunday morning pretty much consisted of getting out of bed, putting on our suits, locking the vans, and we were off to dive on Ningaloo Reef. We didn't have time to make ourselves breakfast so Megan and Jen walked next door to the caravan park to grab something to eat before the dive bus picked us up. While we were waiting for our bus another dive shop's bus pulled up and we overheard one of the employees telling their costumers that the dives and snorkeling for the day had been cancelled due to weather. At this point we thought this was the bus we were waiting for and Jess immediately left to go tell the girls at the Caltex that our dive had been cancelled. As it turned out, it wasn't our company and moments later our bus pulled up to get us...minus three girls. We ended up picking the other three up from the Caltex.
The diving was AMAZING. I am so decided that if the whole law school/federal law enforcement track doesnt work out than I am going to buy a boat and open a dive shop. Seriously, everyone who works on a dive boat is so friendly and they're all goofy people. And for some reason, they all really enjoy making fun of me. On the boat out to our dive sites Jess got seasick, and refused to take the seasickness medication for like half the day. She looked miserable and we tried really hard to convince her to take the medication but she was being stubborn and refusing to admit that she was seasick. Jeni and I were diving while the other four girls snorkeled.
We had our first dive and I was kind of nervous to dive for the first time without a divemaster checking in on me every few minutes, but it turned out to be really easy and the greatest thing I have ever done. On our first dive we got in the water (I did not fall on my face striding off the boat like I did the first time I did a boat dive) and when Jeni tried to equalize her mask a few feet down she must have popped a few blood vessels in her nose because she started bleeding profusely into her mask. It was super gnarly. The entire nose well of her mask was full of blood and it was splattered on the inside of the lenses too; I can only imagine how creepy it must have been to have had to look out of the blood splattered mask. And, I'm not going to lie, I was a little bit worried about sharks. Apart from Jeni bleeding everywhere, it was an really successful dive! We saw a MASSIVE manta ray, lots of pretty little tropical fish, and even a little turtle. More than anything, I was so happy to just be back underwater. It's really nice to swim through the coral and see things that so relatively few people ever have the opprotunity to see. And in itself, it's just awesome to be able to breathe underwater for 45 minutes. Speaking of breathing, apparently I don't breathe very much air at all; the divemaster actually asked me if I was a mermaid. I didn't know how to respond.
After our first dive we had our surface interval which mainly comprised of eating doritos and sitting in the sunshine. The morning had started out really, really rough with massive swells and kind of chilly, but by the afternoon it had turned into a beautiful day! I easily could have slept in the sunshine and been a happy camper. During our first dive the others had done their first snorkle trip as well; the weather had still been kind of crummy when they had gone out and from what I heard, it was kind of more work than it was worth.
Our second dive was even better than the first dive. We went further into Ningaloo Reef and it was gorgeous. There was so much color and all of the coral was just so delicate and exotic. The idiot we were diving with kept touching things and poking at stuff. I wanted to beat him upside the head with a wooden spoon! What kind of idiot doesn't know that you NEVER touch the coral? Jeez. I guess there's always that one person, which helps explain the accelerated rate at which our coral reefs are dying off at. Anyway, the water on the reef was so clear, you could see forever. It was also warm, which was a really nice change from diving at Rottnest. The swim throughs we did were all really pretty too, I think they are my favorite part about the reefs. At one point we were headed down towards another swim through when our divemaster did the hand signal for "shark" and pointed in the direction we were swimming some 20 feet ahead. It was a little reef shark, probably only a little longer than me, and it was just lazily swimming through the reef without being in any kind of particular hurry. Being the stupid humans we are, we swam towards it until it darted off and then kind of circled back up ahead of us. He was really pretty and I was so excited to have actually seen a real shark, but I made a point not to swim at the back of the group after he disappeared. We actually saw him later on our way back to the boat in the same place he had been earlier. So, I did not find Nemo (I'll have to look for him on the GBR) but I did see a shark!
Again, the other girls had done their snorkeling while Jeni and I were diving, and as part of the package we had signed up for Jeni and I were able to snorkel once with the girls as well. We had to pass Turtle Beach to get to our third site and as we got closer to the beach we noticed HUNDREDS of sea turtles on the beach and in the water. For a while we all sat on the boat and watched the turtles before the crew decided that we wouldn't find a much better place to snorkel than right there with a couple hundred sea turtles. Spring break of my freshman year of college my family went to Hawaii without me; when they came home they told me about everything they had been up to, and there was a story about how my little brother got attacked by a sea turtle when he was body boarding. Apparently the turtle had been riding the same wave as my brother and when he went to use his fins to swim my brother was too close to him and got "scratched" (if sea turtles can do such a thing...). The encounter left my brother with scars on the back of his leg. So, while I'm swimming with these turtles I remembered my brother adamantly telling me that a sea turtle attacked him, and all the subsequent jokes he was the butt of. Besides laughing at my brother's misfortune with sea turtles I also thought of Finding Nemo. Noggin'.
The turtles will really cool at one point I was swimming right next to one and I swear it looked me right in the eye when it glanced my direction. I kind of expected the turtles to be a little skittish and be uncomfortable with humans, but they didn't really seem to notice or care that we were swimming with them. I even got close enough to touch the shell of one. It was a really awesome experience and it started to make up for the awful stuff with the vans.
We finished up with the turtles, had lunch on the boat, and on our way back we came across a pod of Humpback Whales just off the coast! There were like 6 or 7 of them and even a little baby. We watched them for a while and it was like having a free whale watching trip on our dive trip! Bonus! I do have to say though, the unbelievably attractive divemaster on our trip was a pretty great addition to the overall awesomeness of the day. It's actually kind of impossible to describe how attractive this man was.
For dinner that night Megan made us breakfast tacos (more commonly known as breakfast burritos) and it was one of the best meals I have had in Australia. We had fun watching Jen, Sarah, and Jess enjoy their first experiences with breakfast burritos as well; apparently they aren't a normal breakfast food in England. We also played this card game after dinner that Jess convinced us would be SO much fun. It's called Chase the Ace and it was awful. I think we had more fun making fun of the game than we did playing it. Chase the Ace is definitely one of those games you play as a kid and it's a blast (like War) but then when you try to play it again you realize that being a kid was probably the only thing that made the game good. So that's how we spent our time in Exmouth. It was overall, the best day of our trip!
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Saturday: "What happened?!" "Jenny! Did you NOT see the sheep??"
Here we go again. I'm hoping I'll be able to fit more than one day into a post, but it probably wont happen. I just have so much to tell y'all about. So here goes with Saturday.
If you remember from the last post, on Friday night we ran out of gas in Jurion Bay and were forced to stop for the night out any reservations. So we slept in the car park of a bar/motel. Sketchy right? Anyway, we all survived the night and woke up bright and early Saturday morning at 5:45 am in the freezing cold vans. I had no idea that it would get so cold at night, and the sleeping bags we had were not made for any temperatures below moderately warm. As Megan and I talked about how we had slept and how the bed was surprisingly kind of comfortable we heard Jen from her position on the top bed waking up as well. Megan asked her how she had slept and we got the most pitiful response I have ever heard. We hear Jen's voice (it's super quiet and kind of muffled since her head is at the opposite end from ours) say, "...I'm so cold...I could die." Jen is always cold, so it's nothing new for her to say it, but the way it came out was so funny in such a sad way. When she eventually climbed down from the coffin bed we covered her with all of the sleeping bags with the hope that it might warm her up a bit faster. Somehow we managed to back our huge camper vans out of the tiny car park and made it over to the gas station we had seen the night before. We got there just after six, which is what time we were told the gas station would open, to find it closed only to realize that it wouldn't open until 7 am. Thankfully, I decided to ask this nice old couple pulling into the car park next door if there was another gas station in Jurion Bay that opened at 6; turns out we were pretty much across the street from the gas station we had been looking for. Everyone had spent the nights in the vans without a bathroom or running water, so it was a mad dash to the bathroom while Megan got stuck with the job of filling up the the vans with gas. I can now officially add "got dressed and brushed teeth in gas station bathroom" to the list of things I did in Australia (along with "slept in sketchy car park"). By the time all six of us had used the bathroom, filled the vans, picked up coffee and reloaded ourselves it was almost 7 am. So much for being on the road by 6:30! Whoops! Megan offered to drive, stating that Jen and I had done the driving yesterday which meant this morning was her turn. We were all in kind of a rush, so we were kind of worried about whether or not Megan would be able to pick up driving manual quickly. But alas, she was a rockstar! I don't even think she stalled once! She picked it up so quickly, it was impressive.
Anyway, as we tried to figure out which way we needed to be headed no one could remember if we had pulled off the main highway to get to Jurion Bay the night before. And there were NO STINKING ROAD SIGNS to tell us what road we were pulling out on to. I had been so tired last night and everything looks so different in the pitch black night of the Australian outback that I couldn't remember exactly if I had pulled off or if the highway went straight through Jurion Bay. We came to the consensus that we would drive back the way we had come the night before and hope to find the main highway quickly. As we drove out of town (the wrong way) I became more an more agitated that there were NO road signs anywhere to help us figure out if we were going the right way. My frustration with the lack of signs added to Megan's nervousness about driving for the first time which was not a good combination. After about 5 minuets I was convinced we needed to turn around and go the other way, so we did. We made it back to the gas station and since Jen was sitting in the passenger seat we had her run into the gas station to ask what road we were on. We needed to be on the North West Coastal Highway. From the car Megan and I yelled at Jen to "run!" and run she did. For those of you who don't know Jen, or haven't seen any pictures, she has the world's longest legs and she's overall long and lanky. Watching her try to get those long legs of hers to cooperate with the movements needed to run was so funny, it lightened the mood in both vans considerably. As she ran back to the van we all watched as Jen bowed her head and pumped her arms furiously in an attempt to move faster. It was hilarious, I wish I could describe it better. Needless to say, it became a joke to tell Jen to "run" as week every time we went somewhere. Thankfully, she took the joke well and laughed along with us.
The morning's drive went really well. I can't actually think of anything that went overly wrong. We had fun navigating through the town of Geraldton where Megan stalled at this one light 4 times. The most amazing part was that we had time to stall 4 times and still make it through the green light!
We stopped for lunch at the Overlander Roadhouse and used their first class, clean as a whistle bathrooms. Please note the heavy sarcasm. The bathrooms were so nasty, if there hadn't been so many flies outside I might have considered peeing behind a bush. We made sandwiches for lunch and ate Tim Tams on one of the picnic tables before packing it up and carrying on. The rest of the afternoon was pretty uneventful except for one roundabout when I was driving in Carnavon. As I drove around the roundabout the cupboard door flew open and all of our food scattered across the van; from that point onward we had to put our big jugs of water in front of the cupboard door to try to keep in it place. Like I said, the vans were ghetto. After the cupboard incident we stopped for gas and Jenny switched driving; as she pulled out of the station and on to the road we all realized at the same moment that we were going the wrong way down a one way road. The other van realized it around the same time as well and started waving wildly at us in an attempt to get our attention and have us turn around. After leaving Carnavon we literally drove in the middle of nowhere until we reached Exmouth that night. We could drive for miles at a time without seeing another car. Right before making the turn off for the road to Exmouth we stopped one last time for gas at this sketchy looking rest stop. While Megan paid for the gas and chatted with the other van, Jen and I stayed with our van. We were in the middle of doing our "driving exercises" (which mainly consisted of making our "humph" faces and waving our arms around) when this guy in a truck pulled up along side our van and watched us creepily. After a minute of two he put the truck in reverse and backed up so that he was parked nose to nose with our fan. When Megan got back we quickly packed ourselves back into the vans and attempted not to make eye contact with whoever this guy was. Just as Megan was closing her door he appeared out of no where beside us and started saying something about how we were lucky to have someone to talk to on such a long drive, Megan smiled and said "Sorry! We have to go" and slammed our car door in his face. Jen wasted no time in getting us out of there. If you have ever heard of the Australian horror movie Wolf Creek, that guy could easily have been the star and basis of the movie.
As we were driving down the Exmouth highway we passed the Tropic of Capricorn sign, where we of course had to stop and take photos together! We have this little bumble bee thing (his name is Bruce) that we got in a kid's meal at Hungry Jack's one night when we went to dinner after formal hall that we took on our road trip. Our goal was to get as many pictures of Bruce in crazy places as possible...so we had Jess climb up the pole of the Tropic of Capricorn sign and hold Bruce above it just so we could get a picture. It was pretty epic. We also did planks in the middle of the road and pretty much ran around burning up some of the energy we had built up while sitting in the vans for so long.
We still had a solid 2 hour drive to Exmouth ahead of us once we got back into the vans after taking photos, and it was getting dark. We still hadn't been able to fix the head light on our van and we were in the middle of the bush; we were all really worried about hitting a kangaroo, turns out our van should have been more worried about the cows, sheep...and stray carousels! We were going the speed limit of 110k/hour and came up over the top of a hill and were headed down into the dip on the otherside when we saw a herd of sheep in the middle of the road. Megan was driving and I didn't want to panic her any further by screaming, so I did my best to maintain my cool as I said "Stop. Stop! STOP!" Megan swore that she heard me yell "Oh my god! STOP THE CAR!" but I think we've finally agreed that she only heard that in her head. Impressively, Megan maintained her composure and remembered to press in the clutch at the same time she was breaking (and not swerving). This all happened in a matter of seconds and as the van came to an almost abrupt stop the bedding and sleeping bags we had piled on the top bed during the drive came flying foward and managed to land solely on top of Jen in the passenger seat. I hadn't seen them come forward, and once I realized I was still alive I looked over just in time to see Jen pulling a sleeping bag off of her head (it took her a long time to figure out how to get it off her head) while shouting "What happened?!" Megan, who at this point must have been close to having a heart attack shouted back "Jenny! Did you NOT see the sheep???" (Earlier in the night Jen hadn't seen the herd of cows that had been standing on the side of the road...at this point we just kind of assumed that she was blind to livestock). Jenny's reply was, "No, I closed my eyes...and then the sleeping bag fell on me!" Once again, I really hope you can picture this in your head, because it was so funny. I hope it's not one of those stories where you had to be there in order to appreciate the humor in it!
While Australia is really, really awful at posting road signs that are helpful, like the names of roads, they are really, really good at posting random and slightly annoying road signs. For instance, there are these signs that say "Floodway" posted every other mile that indicate a lower area of road that might possibly be underwater in the occurance of a flash flood. I don't know much about rainfall in the outback, but I can't imagine flash floods are as prevelant as these signs make them out to be. Another really obnoxious sign is the one that has an image of a cow and a kangaroo on top of it which warn drivers that both cows and kangaroos are present for the next x amount of kilometers. In our van we liked to joke that kangaroos would be jumping over cows for the next x amount of kilometers. It was a bad joke...I'm pretty sure I came up with it. But, I think my favorite ridiculous sign was that one that looked like a carousel horse; all we could make out as we drove by them was a horse with something sticking out of its back. Serious as could be as we drove by one, Jen tells Megan, "Watch out for stray carousels in the road."
It was kind of a let down when we drove by one of the signs in the daylight and realized that what we had thought was a pole was actually a person. The sign was warning to watch out for horseback riders. Lame.
After nearly hitting a herd of sheep and being lucky enough to avoid the stray carousels we arrived in Exmouth in one piece! The other van hadn't been so lucky. Jess was driving and at one point she saw a kangaroo on the side of the road, just as she drove past it the girls heard/felt a big thump. Jess hit the first kangaroo she had ever seen. Kind of sad, isn't it? We like to think that the big guy just shook it off and kept right on hopping. In Exmouth we stopped at a gas station to fill up our van, which at this point was burning through gas at twice the rate of the other van (clutch and engine problems). The other van was in kind of a rush to get to the caravan park and in their haste to get out of the gas station they didn't pay attention to what was behind their van. Unfortunately, Jess backed the van straight into one of the poles in front of a gas pump. The scariest thing about it was that if she had been even a foot further to the right, she would have crashed right into the actual pump. At first the damage didn't look too awful, but it turned out that she hit the cement pole with such force that it actually bent the tow bar back into the bumper which in turn dented the hatch shut. Later that night we figured out that without being able to open the back hatch there was no way to get the table out which was needed to create the bottom bed. Megan, being the epic problem solver that she is, used part of our van's bed to create workable beds in both vans. Like a said, she's kind of a rockstar.
We ended up getting fish and chips for dinner from this really nice lady at a near by shop (who was actually closed for the night but took pity on us) and ate as a group on the front porch of the caravan park's incredibly expensive restaurant. Then, after the longest two days of driving in POS vans of my life, we finally got into the caravan park and were able to start setting up camp. We had gotten powered sites for both vans so that we could charge electronics, keep our food cold, and keep Megan's medication cold and I took it upon myself to plug my van into the power port. Guess what. It didn't work. We spent the next few minutes flipping switches and turning things on and off trying to get the power to work, it became impossible to know if power was actually running through the extension cord or not. I was attempting to make sure the cord was plugged into the van correctly when I got the scariest electrical shock of my life. I actually had little burn marks (or something like them) on my fingers from where I had touched the extension cord. It hurt so badly and the only thing I could think to do was cuss and jump around like an idiot until Megan came running out of the van and made me put my hand in the dirt. My hair was a static-y mess for the rest of the night (which probably explains how so much of my hair ended up on the roof of the camper van since I slept up there that night). After the electric shock we stopped messing with the vans for the night and I decided it was time for me to shower and go to bed. We were all exhausted and had to get up early the next morning to be at the front of the resort to be picked up for scuba/snorkeling so we all went to bed as soon as we could.
I think that about wraps up Saturday! Sunday I went scuba diving on the Ningaloo Reef and it was AMAZING. I'll tell y'all about it in my next post since I don't have time to write about it now. (I really need to work on some homework).
Love always.
If you remember from the last post, on Friday night we ran out of gas in Jurion Bay and were forced to stop for the night out any reservations. So we slept in the car park of a bar/motel. Sketchy right? Anyway, we all survived the night and woke up bright and early Saturday morning at 5:45 am in the freezing cold vans. I had no idea that it would get so cold at night, and the sleeping bags we had were not made for any temperatures below moderately warm. As Megan and I talked about how we had slept and how the bed was surprisingly kind of comfortable we heard Jen from her position on the top bed waking up as well. Megan asked her how she had slept and we got the most pitiful response I have ever heard. We hear Jen's voice (it's super quiet and kind of muffled since her head is at the opposite end from ours) say, "...I'm so cold...I could die." Jen is always cold, so it's nothing new for her to say it, but the way it came out was so funny in such a sad way. When she eventually climbed down from the coffin bed we covered her with all of the sleeping bags with the hope that it might warm her up a bit faster. Somehow we managed to back our huge camper vans out of the tiny car park and made it over to the gas station we had seen the night before. We got there just after six, which is what time we were told the gas station would open, to find it closed only to realize that it wouldn't open until 7 am. Thankfully, I decided to ask this nice old couple pulling into the car park next door if there was another gas station in Jurion Bay that opened at 6; turns out we were pretty much across the street from the gas station we had been looking for. Everyone had spent the nights in the vans without a bathroom or running water, so it was a mad dash to the bathroom while Megan got stuck with the job of filling up the the vans with gas. I can now officially add "got dressed and brushed teeth in gas station bathroom" to the list of things I did in Australia (along with "slept in sketchy car park"). By the time all six of us had used the bathroom, filled the vans, picked up coffee and reloaded ourselves it was almost 7 am. So much for being on the road by 6:30! Whoops! Megan offered to drive, stating that Jen and I had done the driving yesterday which meant this morning was her turn. We were all in kind of a rush, so we were kind of worried about whether or not Megan would be able to pick up driving manual quickly. But alas, she was a rockstar! I don't even think she stalled once! She picked it up so quickly, it was impressive.
Anyway, as we tried to figure out which way we needed to be headed no one could remember if we had pulled off the main highway to get to Jurion Bay the night before. And there were NO STINKING ROAD SIGNS to tell us what road we were pulling out on to. I had been so tired last night and everything looks so different in the pitch black night of the Australian outback that I couldn't remember exactly if I had pulled off or if the highway went straight through Jurion Bay. We came to the consensus that we would drive back the way we had come the night before and hope to find the main highway quickly. As we drove out of town (the wrong way) I became more an more agitated that there were NO road signs anywhere to help us figure out if we were going the right way. My frustration with the lack of signs added to Megan's nervousness about driving for the first time which was not a good combination. After about 5 minuets I was convinced we needed to turn around and go the other way, so we did. We made it back to the gas station and since Jen was sitting in the passenger seat we had her run into the gas station to ask what road we were on. We needed to be on the North West Coastal Highway. From the car Megan and I yelled at Jen to "run!" and run she did. For those of you who don't know Jen, or haven't seen any pictures, she has the world's longest legs and she's overall long and lanky. Watching her try to get those long legs of hers to cooperate with the movements needed to run was so funny, it lightened the mood in both vans considerably. As she ran back to the van we all watched as Jen bowed her head and pumped her arms furiously in an attempt to move faster. It was hilarious, I wish I could describe it better. Needless to say, it became a joke to tell Jen to "run" as week every time we went somewhere. Thankfully, she took the joke well and laughed along with us.
The morning's drive went really well. I can't actually think of anything that went overly wrong. We had fun navigating through the town of Geraldton where Megan stalled at this one light 4 times. The most amazing part was that we had time to stall 4 times and still make it through the green light!
We stopped for lunch at the Overlander Roadhouse and used their first class, clean as a whistle bathrooms. Please note the heavy sarcasm. The bathrooms were so nasty, if there hadn't been so many flies outside I might have considered peeing behind a bush. We made sandwiches for lunch and ate Tim Tams on one of the picnic tables before packing it up and carrying on. The rest of the afternoon was pretty uneventful except for one roundabout when I was driving in Carnavon. As I drove around the roundabout the cupboard door flew open and all of our food scattered across the van; from that point onward we had to put our big jugs of water in front of the cupboard door to try to keep in it place. Like I said, the vans were ghetto. After the cupboard incident we stopped for gas and Jenny switched driving; as she pulled out of the station and on to the road we all realized at the same moment that we were going the wrong way down a one way road. The other van realized it around the same time as well and started waving wildly at us in an attempt to get our attention and have us turn around. After leaving Carnavon we literally drove in the middle of nowhere until we reached Exmouth that night. We could drive for miles at a time without seeing another car. Right before making the turn off for the road to Exmouth we stopped one last time for gas at this sketchy looking rest stop. While Megan paid for the gas and chatted with the other van, Jen and I stayed with our van. We were in the middle of doing our "driving exercises" (which mainly consisted of making our "humph" faces and waving our arms around) when this guy in a truck pulled up along side our van and watched us creepily. After a minute of two he put the truck in reverse and backed up so that he was parked nose to nose with our fan. When Megan got back we quickly packed ourselves back into the vans and attempted not to make eye contact with whoever this guy was. Just as Megan was closing her door he appeared out of no where beside us and started saying something about how we were lucky to have someone to talk to on such a long drive, Megan smiled and said "Sorry! We have to go" and slammed our car door in his face. Jen wasted no time in getting us out of there. If you have ever heard of the Australian horror movie Wolf Creek, that guy could easily have been the star and basis of the movie.
As we were driving down the Exmouth highway we passed the Tropic of Capricorn sign, where we of course had to stop and take photos together! We have this little bumble bee thing (his name is Bruce) that we got in a kid's meal at Hungry Jack's one night when we went to dinner after formal hall that we took on our road trip. Our goal was to get as many pictures of Bruce in crazy places as possible...so we had Jess climb up the pole of the Tropic of Capricorn sign and hold Bruce above it just so we could get a picture. It was pretty epic. We also did planks in the middle of the road and pretty much ran around burning up some of the energy we had built up while sitting in the vans for so long.
We still had a solid 2 hour drive to Exmouth ahead of us once we got back into the vans after taking photos, and it was getting dark. We still hadn't been able to fix the head light on our van and we were in the middle of the bush; we were all really worried about hitting a kangaroo, turns out our van should have been more worried about the cows, sheep...and stray carousels! We were going the speed limit of 110k/hour and came up over the top of a hill and were headed down into the dip on the otherside when we saw a herd of sheep in the middle of the road. Megan was driving and I didn't want to panic her any further by screaming, so I did my best to maintain my cool as I said "Stop. Stop! STOP!" Megan swore that she heard me yell "Oh my god! STOP THE CAR!" but I think we've finally agreed that she only heard that in her head. Impressively, Megan maintained her composure and remembered to press in the clutch at the same time she was breaking (and not swerving). This all happened in a matter of seconds and as the van came to an almost abrupt stop the bedding and sleeping bags we had piled on the top bed during the drive came flying foward and managed to land solely on top of Jen in the passenger seat. I hadn't seen them come forward, and once I realized I was still alive I looked over just in time to see Jen pulling a sleeping bag off of her head (it took her a long time to figure out how to get it off her head) while shouting "What happened?!" Megan, who at this point must have been close to having a heart attack shouted back "Jenny! Did you NOT see the sheep???" (Earlier in the night Jen hadn't seen the herd of cows that had been standing on the side of the road...at this point we just kind of assumed that she was blind to livestock). Jenny's reply was, "No, I closed my eyes...and then the sleeping bag fell on me!" Once again, I really hope you can picture this in your head, because it was so funny. I hope it's not one of those stories where you had to be there in order to appreciate the humor in it!
While Australia is really, really awful at posting road signs that are helpful, like the names of roads, they are really, really good at posting random and slightly annoying road signs. For instance, there are these signs that say "Floodway" posted every other mile that indicate a lower area of road that might possibly be underwater in the occurance of a flash flood. I don't know much about rainfall in the outback, but I can't imagine flash floods are as prevelant as these signs make them out to be. Another really obnoxious sign is the one that has an image of a cow and a kangaroo on top of it which warn drivers that both cows and kangaroos are present for the next x amount of kilometers. In our van we liked to joke that kangaroos would be jumping over cows for the next x amount of kilometers. It was a bad joke...I'm pretty sure I came up with it. But, I think my favorite ridiculous sign was that one that looked like a carousel horse; all we could make out as we drove by them was a horse with something sticking out of its back. Serious as could be as we drove by one, Jen tells Megan, "Watch out for stray carousels in the road."
It was kind of a let down when we drove by one of the signs in the daylight and realized that what we had thought was a pole was actually a person. The sign was warning to watch out for horseback riders. Lame.
After nearly hitting a herd of sheep and being lucky enough to avoid the stray carousels we arrived in Exmouth in one piece! The other van hadn't been so lucky. Jess was driving and at one point she saw a kangaroo on the side of the road, just as she drove past it the girls heard/felt a big thump. Jess hit the first kangaroo she had ever seen. Kind of sad, isn't it? We like to think that the big guy just shook it off and kept right on hopping. In Exmouth we stopped at a gas station to fill up our van, which at this point was burning through gas at twice the rate of the other van (clutch and engine problems). The other van was in kind of a rush to get to the caravan park and in their haste to get out of the gas station they didn't pay attention to what was behind their van. Unfortunately, Jess backed the van straight into one of the poles in front of a gas pump. The scariest thing about it was that if she had been even a foot further to the right, she would have crashed right into the actual pump. At first the damage didn't look too awful, but it turned out that she hit the cement pole with such force that it actually bent the tow bar back into the bumper which in turn dented the hatch shut. Later that night we figured out that without being able to open the back hatch there was no way to get the table out which was needed to create the bottom bed. Megan, being the epic problem solver that she is, used part of our van's bed to create workable beds in both vans. Like a said, she's kind of a rockstar.
We ended up getting fish and chips for dinner from this really nice lady at a near by shop (who was actually closed for the night but took pity on us) and ate as a group on the front porch of the caravan park's incredibly expensive restaurant. Then, after the longest two days of driving in POS vans of my life, we finally got into the caravan park and were able to start setting up camp. We had gotten powered sites for both vans so that we could charge electronics, keep our food cold, and keep Megan's medication cold and I took it upon myself to plug my van into the power port. Guess what. It didn't work. We spent the next few minutes flipping switches and turning things on and off trying to get the power to work, it became impossible to know if power was actually running through the extension cord or not. I was attempting to make sure the cord was plugged into the van correctly when I got the scariest electrical shock of my life. I actually had little burn marks (or something like them) on my fingers from where I had touched the extension cord. It hurt so badly and the only thing I could think to do was cuss and jump around like an idiot until Megan came running out of the van and made me put my hand in the dirt. My hair was a static-y mess for the rest of the night (which probably explains how so much of my hair ended up on the roof of the camper van since I slept up there that night). After the electric shock we stopped messing with the vans for the night and I decided it was time for me to shower and go to bed. We were all exhausted and had to get up early the next morning to be at the front of the resort to be picked up for scuba/snorkeling so we all went to bed as soon as we could.
I think that about wraps up Saturday! Sunday I went scuba diving on the Ningaloo Reef and it was AMAZING. I'll tell y'all about it in my next post since I don't have time to write about it now. (I really need to work on some homework).
Love always.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Friday: "We're at the road where we can go left or right...which way do we turn?"
Our road trip was a disaster. I think that about sums it up. But really, it was doomed from the morning we left, and it didn't really get any better. It's been kind of hard to remember all of the fun we had while we were gone because the bad stuff has been so overshadowing, but I think we did a good job of finding silver linings and making the bad situations fun. I think it will just be easier to break the road trip down by days, that way I don't forget to write about something important.
Thursday:
Jess, Sarah, and Jeni were in charge of going grocery shopping for our trip and they went Thursday night while I was in class. I'm actually a little bit surprised at how well they did in buying good food (not just crisps, sweets, and chocolates). We had strawberries, celery, carrots, and apples which all turned out to be much better snack foods on our long drive anyway; when crisps are the only thing you eat all day you feel kind of sick. Anyway, Jess stayed the night at Cats on Thursday night so she would be here with all of her stuff Friday morning when we left after her class. As usual, I didn't pack until the night before leaving, so at 11:00 I was running around trying to get my stuff together so I could go to bed at a reasonable hour. You know how you always forget to pack at least one thing? I forgot to pack an extra pair of contacts. I was so worried all week that I would lose a contact and be blind for the rest of the trip (thankfully I remembered to pack my glasses though).
Friday:
I got up super early with everyone else so we could get brekkie and get the last minute things together before going to pick up the vans. Jess had class until 10 am, but she ducked out at 9:30 to meet us at the bus stop so we could get the vans as early as possible. Originally we had planned to pick up the vans at 9 which was the earliest we were allowed to get them; but a few days before we left Jess' class was un-cancelled, which threw a bit of a wrench into our planning. That was the first thing that went wrong...we should have seen it as a sign and called it quits then!
Megan had been in charge of finding directions to the van pick up place, but unfortunately she didn't know that Perth has more than one bus station. Megan had accidentally assumed that the Wellington bus station, where we wanted to go, was the bus station located near the center of the city where we go to shop and do things like that. She was a little bit wrong. We ended up at the wrong bus station and spent a few minutes running around trying to find another bus that would take us to the bus station that we wanted to be at. We eventually found a bus that would take us to Wellington, the driver was a little bit creepy (Perth bus drivers have kind of a bad habit of muttering to themselves and acting kind of crazy). At Wellington we had to catch one more bus that would take us to Newcastle St. It was really obvious that we had no idea where we were going and the sweet bus driver (not a crazy one) was really helpful and shouted when we were at the stop we needed to get off at. He even helped point us in the right way when we got off the bus.
The rental place was pretty easy to find and when we arrived they weren't too busy. I was expecting we would be able to slap down 2 credit cards, grab our vans, and be out of there in 30 minutes. I was really excited, even though the rental place looked dodgy as all get out. However, Megan's credit card wouldn't work and we had been given wrong information about third party credit cards when we had called weeks previous, so Jeni's dad's credit card wouldn't work either. We had to go through this super long process of calling Megan's credit card company and trying to get ahold of Jeni's dad so he could sign paperwork for us to use his card. At this point there were tons of people waiting behind us to get their rentals and all of us were starting to feel a little stressed. When it seemed like working out the details of Megan's card was just going to be too much to deal with I offered to put down my dad's AMEX for the $3,000 bond on one of the vans. And then stupidly (I really didn't think my choices through...I just wanted to get our vans and leave since we had already wasted almost two hours) I put down my own debit card on the bond for the second van. With the money down we were able to continue with our rental and actually got our vans. They were total pieces of sh**. Honestly, they were ghetto. But we were so excited to be getting them and leaving that we didn't really care. We did all of the paperwork and learned about how to make sure the stupid things were maintained "properly" and then we were off to St Cats to pack up our stuff and hit the road! It was decided that Jenny and Jess would drive the vans back to Cats since they are both familiar with driving manuals on the left side of the road (in the right side of the car). We figured having the Americans figure out the whole driving concept in the city would be a bad idea.
We made it 3 blocks from the rental place when the van I was in (Jess was driving) started having all of these issues with shifting. Jess couldn't get the car to go into 1st gear unless she bashed on the shifter, and once in first the stupid thing wouldn't shift up at all. We were stalling in the middle of the road trying to figure the stupid things out, which was really stressful. We eventually made it to a parking lot where Jess pulled over and we tried to call the other van to come back and find us. We were worried that if they got too far ahead we wouldn't be able to make it back to Cats since we didn't have a map (it later turned out that our map was in the map folder in our car, but since it had been folded in half Jeni hadn't seen it and assumed we didn't have one). We spent a solid 15 minutes calling each other and trying to figure out where we were in relation to the other van. When we finally found each other we thought that maybe the van was just having issues because Jess was really nervous and wasn't driving right. Sarah and I drove the van around the car park and didn't experience any issues with the clutch or gear box, so we just assumed that we were correct in thinking Jess had just been stressed. Sarah offered to drive the van back to Cats instead and Jess took her place riding in the van that Jen was driving. We made it another block, and then Sarah started experiencing the exact same issues that Jess had experienced with the gear box.
We pulled over and called road side assistance. Funny thing, they couldn't find our registration in their database, but they attributed that to recently we had rented the vans. They just assumed that our data hadn't been updated into the system. Roadside assistance sent out a mechanic/tow to look at our car and he jumped us and sent us back to the rental place to have them look at our van. When we showed back up those idiots tried to tell us there was nothing wrong with the van and that the battery would be fine all the way to Exmouth and back (it's a 16 hour drive to Exmouth). We actually had to argue with the employees about putting a new battery in the van, they were not happy about it. We also asked them to drive the van since they didn't believe us when we told them there was something wrong with the gears. They finally caved and took the van to a "mechanic" aka some creep who's friends with the people at Traveller's Auto Barn. The tightened the gear box and it seemed to be working better, but it wasn't working the way it should have been. We tried asking them to exchange the van out for a different one so they could look at the issues the van was having and let us a take another one, but they wouldn't even consider it.
By the time we finally left the Traveller's Auto Barn it was pushing four in the afternoon...we wanted to be leaving perth at 11:30 at the latest. We got back to Cats and had to pack all of our stuff into the vans before we could leave too, so I think we were finally ready to leave at around 5, which was unfortunate considering it was rush hour. We had Google Maps directions that were supposed to direct us out of the city, but somehow we got lost. The van behind us got separated at some point and kept calling to figure out which way they needed to turn at which street to stay on the same path we were taking, at one point Jeni called Megan and said "We're at the road where we can go left or right...which way do we turn?" It was hilarious. There was a long pause before Megan replied that she needed more information than that to help them out. My phone also rang while we were driving through the city and at the time of the call I was busy trying to read the map and figure out where we were at, I assumed it was the other van calling again so when I answered I snapped/yelled "Yeah?" in a pretty annoyed/stressed tone. Turns out that it wasn't the other van on the line, it was my hot dive master, Dean. Yes, the one time I think I have ever answered the phone in a rude way was when Dean called. Just my luck. He just wanted to let me know that my dive card was in at the shop and I could pick it up whenever. I felt so bad; I tried to explain why I snapped at him, but it was just awkward and I really just wanted to hang up and pretend it hadn't happened. Moral of the story, always be nice when you answer the phone, you never know if it'll be a hottie on the other end. After my conversation with Dean we were still in the city and we were still trying to find our way out. Megan was in the middle seat and she had a fold up road map that she had purchased at the Caltex which had an ok map of the city that she was trying to look at. As she unfolded the map she was kind of flailing around with it and smacked me in the face with it multiple times as she turned it this way and that looking for the right map. (Imagine her with her arms completely outstretched with this huge map flipping it upside down and turning it over while trying not to get in Jen's way of driving. It was beyond funny, I really hope you can picture it in your head.) These two guys on the sidewalk saw all of this happen and they just stood there laughing at us until the light we were stopped at turned green and we were able to drive away. Honestly, the should make a movie about our road trip, with as much crazy/awful stuff that happened (and the fact that we are all alive and still friends) it would be a box office hit.
We made it out of the city eventually and made good time for a couple of hours. As it started to get dark we thought it would be a good time to try to teach Megan and Jeni how to drive manual. We pulled off the main highway and onto some back road that looked like it was fairly empty. Megan picked it up really quickly; she only stalled the van a few times. It was little bit harder for Jeni, she didn't really understand right away when she needed to upshift and downshift. We spent around an hour driving up and down this one little road while Megan and Jeni practiced. Then it was my turn to drive! I'm actually really, really proud of myself. I didn't stall the van once! It did take me about 3 days worth of driving to break myself of the habit of trying to shift with my right hand. I had bruises and small cuts on my right knuckles from all the times I hit the driver's door when I trying to shift. Driving on the left side of the road was really easy to pick up as well, it's only when I went to turn that I had to make sure that I stayed to the left and think through my turn. By the time our trip came to an abrupt end I had the driving thing down! (Hopefully when I come home I pick up driving the "right" way again just as quickly! Watch, when I drive manual I'll have to break myself of the habit of trying to shift with my left hand!). It was funny actually, everyone wanted to drive, no one in our van ever tried to wiggle their way out of their turn behind the wheel. Driving was fun, plus with those POS vans when you were driving at least you felt like you had a little more control as opposed to when you were a passenger and you were praying the engine didn't blow up underneath you.
It was getting dark so we decided we should probably get back on the road...turns out my van had a burnt out headlight and the other working headlight as well as the brights were directed downward and to the left, so they didn't even light up the road! It was awful we had to drive with the brights on just to be able to see at all. At around 8 we decided we needed to stop for gas and get something to eat for dinner. We found a little town called Lanclin just off the highway that we figured we could stop off at to get some gas and grub. As we drove into the town we realized it was DARK and it was DEAD. There was literally nothing around us. We found one small pizza place on the side of the road and that was it, we didn't really want to drive much further down the deserted road so we pulled over there. The pizza place was super tiny and this nice, but strange, woman was the only one working. We ate outside and all joked about how if we were in a movie we were at the point just before we all started to die. For some reason we were talking about walking down the road to find the bar, I think so we could use the bathroom, and Jess said "Oh, I've seen this movie! We're going to die if we try to walk to the bar." She was probably right. Lanclin was spooky to say the least. After dinner we were discussing how far we should go before we stopped to fill up on gas. (Earlier we had decided we would just drive straight through the night to make up for lost time at the rental place earlier in the day). We realized that in the middle of the outback, the gas stations close at 8 pm...which meant we could go as far as we could get on a tank of gas and then we were stranded until the gas stations opened at 6 am the next morning.
We made it as far as Jurion Bay before the other van ran out of gas and we had to stop for the night. We didn't have reservations in Jurion, so we had no idea where we were going to sleep since the office at the caravan park had closed hours before. Jen, Megan and I drove further into town (we left the other van parked near a park so they wouldn't run out of gas) and found a hotel/bar that was open. This bar was a mad house. Imagine what you think a bar in the middle of the outback would be like...that is this bar. There were no women and it was full of these crazy strange men. And it smelled awful. The man at the reception desk (which was in the bar) told us that we could rent a room for some ridiculous price, which we weren't willing to pay for...so we decided we would go into the bar, buy something and then sleep in the car park (parking lot) and hope that no one would come along and kick us out. Going into the bar was an awful idea. These guys flocked to our table and were all strange and kept trying to hold our hands and do weird things. We didn't stay long before telling them we had to walk to our "hostel" for the night. We used the bar's bathroom and then snuck out before the bar closed so we could be in the vans before everyone came out. While we were moving around trying to get ready for bed the other van called us and whispered "Don't move! Stop moving! There are cops outside the vans!" Immediately all three of us stopped moving..which was hilarious since Jen was only halfway up onto the top bed (it's impossible to get up there without shaking the van like crazy). We lie there for what seemed like forever not making a sound while we waited for a cop to knock on our door and tell us to move. Thankfully no one came to kick us out, so after a while we decided it was safe to move (just a little bit) so we could get comfortable. As I was falling asleep these drunk guys walked by our vans and I heard one of them say, "Hey look at those camper vans! Wouldn't it be fun if we tipped them over?" Right afterwards Megan says, "Lynz? Did you hear that?" I whispered back that I had to which she replies "Well, if we hear a big crash I guess we know what happened to the other van..." It was so funny, I've never in my life had to try so hard not to laugh out loud and draw attention to myself.
I guess that about wraps it up for Friday. I'll write another post(s) about the rest of the trip later. I figure as long as I get one post up, and since this one is so long, it should get some of yall off my back about my road trip.
Check in later for more.
Love always.
Thursday:
Jess, Sarah, and Jeni were in charge of going grocery shopping for our trip and they went Thursday night while I was in class. I'm actually a little bit surprised at how well they did in buying good food (not just crisps, sweets, and chocolates). We had strawberries, celery, carrots, and apples which all turned out to be much better snack foods on our long drive anyway; when crisps are the only thing you eat all day you feel kind of sick. Anyway, Jess stayed the night at Cats on Thursday night so she would be here with all of her stuff Friday morning when we left after her class. As usual, I didn't pack until the night before leaving, so at 11:00 I was running around trying to get my stuff together so I could go to bed at a reasonable hour. You know how you always forget to pack at least one thing? I forgot to pack an extra pair of contacts. I was so worried all week that I would lose a contact and be blind for the rest of the trip (thankfully I remembered to pack my glasses though).
Friday:
I got up super early with everyone else so we could get brekkie and get the last minute things together before going to pick up the vans. Jess had class until 10 am, but she ducked out at 9:30 to meet us at the bus stop so we could get the vans as early as possible. Originally we had planned to pick up the vans at 9 which was the earliest we were allowed to get them; but a few days before we left Jess' class was un-cancelled, which threw a bit of a wrench into our planning. That was the first thing that went wrong...we should have seen it as a sign and called it quits then!
Megan had been in charge of finding directions to the van pick up place, but unfortunately she didn't know that Perth has more than one bus station. Megan had accidentally assumed that the Wellington bus station, where we wanted to go, was the bus station located near the center of the city where we go to shop and do things like that. She was a little bit wrong. We ended up at the wrong bus station and spent a few minutes running around trying to find another bus that would take us to the bus station that we wanted to be at. We eventually found a bus that would take us to Wellington, the driver was a little bit creepy (Perth bus drivers have kind of a bad habit of muttering to themselves and acting kind of crazy). At Wellington we had to catch one more bus that would take us to Newcastle St. It was really obvious that we had no idea where we were going and the sweet bus driver (not a crazy one) was really helpful and shouted when we were at the stop we needed to get off at. He even helped point us in the right way when we got off the bus.
The rental place was pretty easy to find and when we arrived they weren't too busy. I was expecting we would be able to slap down 2 credit cards, grab our vans, and be out of there in 30 minutes. I was really excited, even though the rental place looked dodgy as all get out. However, Megan's credit card wouldn't work and we had been given wrong information about third party credit cards when we had called weeks previous, so Jeni's dad's credit card wouldn't work either. We had to go through this super long process of calling Megan's credit card company and trying to get ahold of Jeni's dad so he could sign paperwork for us to use his card. At this point there were tons of people waiting behind us to get their rentals and all of us were starting to feel a little stressed. When it seemed like working out the details of Megan's card was just going to be too much to deal with I offered to put down my dad's AMEX for the $3,000 bond on one of the vans. And then stupidly (I really didn't think my choices through...I just wanted to get our vans and leave since we had already wasted almost two hours) I put down my own debit card on the bond for the second van. With the money down we were able to continue with our rental and actually got our vans. They were total pieces of sh**. Honestly, they were ghetto. But we were so excited to be getting them and leaving that we didn't really care. We did all of the paperwork and learned about how to make sure the stupid things were maintained "properly" and then we were off to St Cats to pack up our stuff and hit the road! It was decided that Jenny and Jess would drive the vans back to Cats since they are both familiar with driving manuals on the left side of the road (in the right side of the car). We figured having the Americans figure out the whole driving concept in the city would be a bad idea.
We made it 3 blocks from the rental place when the van I was in (Jess was driving) started having all of these issues with shifting. Jess couldn't get the car to go into 1st gear unless she bashed on the shifter, and once in first the stupid thing wouldn't shift up at all. We were stalling in the middle of the road trying to figure the stupid things out, which was really stressful. We eventually made it to a parking lot where Jess pulled over and we tried to call the other van to come back and find us. We were worried that if they got too far ahead we wouldn't be able to make it back to Cats since we didn't have a map (it later turned out that our map was in the map folder in our car, but since it had been folded in half Jeni hadn't seen it and assumed we didn't have one). We spent a solid 15 minutes calling each other and trying to figure out where we were in relation to the other van. When we finally found each other we thought that maybe the van was just having issues because Jess was really nervous and wasn't driving right. Sarah and I drove the van around the car park and didn't experience any issues with the clutch or gear box, so we just assumed that we were correct in thinking Jess had just been stressed. Sarah offered to drive the van back to Cats instead and Jess took her place riding in the van that Jen was driving. We made it another block, and then Sarah started experiencing the exact same issues that Jess had experienced with the gear box.
We pulled over and called road side assistance. Funny thing, they couldn't find our registration in their database, but they attributed that to recently we had rented the vans. They just assumed that our data hadn't been updated into the system. Roadside assistance sent out a mechanic/tow to look at our car and he jumped us and sent us back to the rental place to have them look at our van. When we showed back up those idiots tried to tell us there was nothing wrong with the van and that the battery would be fine all the way to Exmouth and back (it's a 16 hour drive to Exmouth). We actually had to argue with the employees about putting a new battery in the van, they were not happy about it. We also asked them to drive the van since they didn't believe us when we told them there was something wrong with the gears. They finally caved and took the van to a "mechanic" aka some creep who's friends with the people at Traveller's Auto Barn. The tightened the gear box and it seemed to be working better, but it wasn't working the way it should have been. We tried asking them to exchange the van out for a different one so they could look at the issues the van was having and let us a take another one, but they wouldn't even consider it.
By the time we finally left the Traveller's Auto Barn it was pushing four in the afternoon...we wanted to be leaving perth at 11:30 at the latest. We got back to Cats and had to pack all of our stuff into the vans before we could leave too, so I think we were finally ready to leave at around 5, which was unfortunate considering it was rush hour. We had Google Maps directions that were supposed to direct us out of the city, but somehow we got lost. The van behind us got separated at some point and kept calling to figure out which way they needed to turn at which street to stay on the same path we were taking, at one point Jeni called Megan and said "We're at the road where we can go left or right...which way do we turn?" It was hilarious. There was a long pause before Megan replied that she needed more information than that to help them out. My phone also rang while we were driving through the city and at the time of the call I was busy trying to read the map and figure out where we were at, I assumed it was the other van calling again so when I answered I snapped/yelled "Yeah?" in a pretty annoyed/stressed tone. Turns out that it wasn't the other van on the line, it was my hot dive master, Dean. Yes, the one time I think I have ever answered the phone in a rude way was when Dean called. Just my luck. He just wanted to let me know that my dive card was in at the shop and I could pick it up whenever. I felt so bad; I tried to explain why I snapped at him, but it was just awkward and I really just wanted to hang up and pretend it hadn't happened. Moral of the story, always be nice when you answer the phone, you never know if it'll be a hottie on the other end. After my conversation with Dean we were still in the city and we were still trying to find our way out. Megan was in the middle seat and she had a fold up road map that she had purchased at the Caltex which had an ok map of the city that she was trying to look at. As she unfolded the map she was kind of flailing around with it and smacked me in the face with it multiple times as she turned it this way and that looking for the right map. (Imagine her with her arms completely outstretched with this huge map flipping it upside down and turning it over while trying not to get in Jen's way of driving. It was beyond funny, I really hope you can picture it in your head.) These two guys on the sidewalk saw all of this happen and they just stood there laughing at us until the light we were stopped at turned green and we were able to drive away. Honestly, the should make a movie about our road trip, with as much crazy/awful stuff that happened (and the fact that we are all alive and still friends) it would be a box office hit.
We made it out of the city eventually and made good time for a couple of hours. As it started to get dark we thought it would be a good time to try to teach Megan and Jeni how to drive manual. We pulled off the main highway and onto some back road that looked like it was fairly empty. Megan picked it up really quickly; she only stalled the van a few times. It was little bit harder for Jeni, she didn't really understand right away when she needed to upshift and downshift. We spent around an hour driving up and down this one little road while Megan and Jeni practiced. Then it was my turn to drive! I'm actually really, really proud of myself. I didn't stall the van once! It did take me about 3 days worth of driving to break myself of the habit of trying to shift with my right hand. I had bruises and small cuts on my right knuckles from all the times I hit the driver's door when I trying to shift. Driving on the left side of the road was really easy to pick up as well, it's only when I went to turn that I had to make sure that I stayed to the left and think through my turn. By the time our trip came to an abrupt end I had the driving thing down! (Hopefully when I come home I pick up driving the "right" way again just as quickly! Watch, when I drive manual I'll have to break myself of the habit of trying to shift with my left hand!). It was funny actually, everyone wanted to drive, no one in our van ever tried to wiggle their way out of their turn behind the wheel. Driving was fun, plus with those POS vans when you were driving at least you felt like you had a little more control as opposed to when you were a passenger and you were praying the engine didn't blow up underneath you.
It was getting dark so we decided we should probably get back on the road...turns out my van had a burnt out headlight and the other working headlight as well as the brights were directed downward and to the left, so they didn't even light up the road! It was awful we had to drive with the brights on just to be able to see at all. At around 8 we decided we needed to stop for gas and get something to eat for dinner. We found a little town called Lanclin just off the highway that we figured we could stop off at to get some gas and grub. As we drove into the town we realized it was DARK and it was DEAD. There was literally nothing around us. We found one small pizza place on the side of the road and that was it, we didn't really want to drive much further down the deserted road so we pulled over there. The pizza place was super tiny and this nice, but strange, woman was the only one working. We ate outside and all joked about how if we were in a movie we were at the point just before we all started to die. For some reason we were talking about walking down the road to find the bar, I think so we could use the bathroom, and Jess said "Oh, I've seen this movie! We're going to die if we try to walk to the bar." She was probably right. Lanclin was spooky to say the least. After dinner we were discussing how far we should go before we stopped to fill up on gas. (Earlier we had decided we would just drive straight through the night to make up for lost time at the rental place earlier in the day). We realized that in the middle of the outback, the gas stations close at 8 pm...which meant we could go as far as we could get on a tank of gas and then we were stranded until the gas stations opened at 6 am the next morning.
We made it as far as Jurion Bay before the other van ran out of gas and we had to stop for the night. We didn't have reservations in Jurion, so we had no idea where we were going to sleep since the office at the caravan park had closed hours before. Jen, Megan and I drove further into town (we left the other van parked near a park so they wouldn't run out of gas) and found a hotel/bar that was open. This bar was a mad house. Imagine what you think a bar in the middle of the outback would be like...that is this bar. There were no women and it was full of these crazy strange men. And it smelled awful. The man at the reception desk (which was in the bar) told us that we could rent a room for some ridiculous price, which we weren't willing to pay for...so we decided we would go into the bar, buy something and then sleep in the car park (parking lot) and hope that no one would come along and kick us out. Going into the bar was an awful idea. These guys flocked to our table and were all strange and kept trying to hold our hands and do weird things. We didn't stay long before telling them we had to walk to our "hostel" for the night. We used the bar's bathroom and then snuck out before the bar closed so we could be in the vans before everyone came out. While we were moving around trying to get ready for bed the other van called us and whispered "Don't move! Stop moving! There are cops outside the vans!" Immediately all three of us stopped moving..which was hilarious since Jen was only halfway up onto the top bed (it's impossible to get up there without shaking the van like crazy). We lie there for what seemed like forever not making a sound while we waited for a cop to knock on our door and tell us to move. Thankfully no one came to kick us out, so after a while we decided it was safe to move (just a little bit) so we could get comfortable. As I was falling asleep these drunk guys walked by our vans and I heard one of them say, "Hey look at those camper vans! Wouldn't it be fun if we tipped them over?" Right afterwards Megan says, "Lynz? Did you hear that?" I whispered back that I had to which she replies "Well, if we hear a big crash I guess we know what happened to the other van..." It was so funny, I've never in my life had to try so hard not to laugh out loud and draw attention to myself.
I guess that about wraps it up for Friday. I'll write another post(s) about the rest of the trip later. I figure as long as I get one post up, and since this one is so long, it should get some of yall off my back about my road trip.
Check in later for more.
Love always.
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