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.
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