Monday at Broken Hill

Monday at Broken Hill

I got up early on Monday after a night of weird dreams and decided to go for an exploration run. It was a really sunny day and no clouds in the sky. It was so early that there was hardly a car on the road. Greg was sound asleep and I didn’t want to wake him. The first annoying thing was my ipod was flat. So I called it a useless piece of crap under my breath. Then I couldn’t find my runners or my hat and by the time I got myself organized and without my music, I hit the road. I listen to music because I love to but in the winter time the headphones cover my ears and keep them warm so it wasn’t long into the run that I had a smashing earache from the cold. Never mind. At least my phone wasn’t too flat and I put it on ‘runkeeper’ which has a GPS and you can see where you are. I ran into town which was further than I thought. Found some points of interest such as the street that the famous actor Chips Raferty was born and ran home thoroughly happy.

I was hoping to get a load of washing on as I hadn’t washed clothes in such a while I knew we were down to the last undies and socks. The trouble was the laundry was shut and locked. I checked it out on the way to the loos first thing then again at 7.30 hoping to get a load on the line and go for a run but still they were locked. By the time I got back from my run however, they were open and occupied – RATS! I would just have to grab my washing and wait and pounce. The laundry had 2 sides and one side was full of oldish ladies fussing over clothes but the other side - miracles never cease, not only had a front loader washing machine which was enormous, but a youngish lady was just pulling her wash out of it. Praise the Lord! I loaded all the clothes I had which were quite a lot and still had room – so I then stood and looked at it. I could not fit any more clothes in my sack which would have been 2 loads at home. What was I wearing then that I can put in the machine? I found a hanky in my pocked – in it went. Then my jumper I was wearing – that went in and it was a bit cold without it. Next I took off my bra and tossed it in too. Then I ran out of things to put in without being indecent so cuddled my washing bag all the way back to the van, very pleased with myself.

I fiddled around in the van and Greg still hadn’t stirred so I went for a shower. When I got back he was still asleep so I kicked him out of bed. Time is a wasting!

Greg felt terrible all day. I think it was the news of yesterday reacting against him. He was really out of sorts so I declared it a day of scrounging for free WIFI so I could upload blogs.

We ventured down the street to the tourist information centre to see if they could tell us where one might score some free WIFI and they said that the Gloria Jeans which was right next to the centre had it. Why is it all the chains that sell crap food like McDonalds and rubbish coffee have free wifi? Its not fair.

Deciding that we would go get a decent coffee first then come back, we hopped back in the truck and hit the main drag. There were not that many coffee shops we discovered but there was a pub come restaurant come coffee shop that had free wifi so we ordered a coffee there and they gave us the code for the wifi. You only had 15 minutes of it so I decided to get all the typing done first and then, with Greg doing the photos, upload all at once.  An hour and a half went by, our coffee was lovely and long gone and the staff started asking whether we would like to stay for lunch. Reluctant to spend money on food when we already had some at the camp, we declined, packed up our stuff and left. I had managed to get one blog up but it needed more photos.

Back at the camp I had 2 dishes of left overs so I combined them into one on the stove and we had a nice casserole with veggies. We broke out the camping table and chairs and listened to the traffic, dogs barking and surrounding industry humming and thumping away and ate our lunch in really nice sunshine.

Greg started to go through the photos from Mungo National Park only to find that one of his camera bodies wasn’t operating properly and all the photos were out of focus. This was indeed a major inconvenience, bummer, disappointment and one that did make everyone very cross indeed. However, he still had the photos from the other camera (he took 2 bodies along) which were fine so he played around with them in a program called ‘light room’ which is kind of a photoshop type of thing.

I ventured up to the office to see where we could get some wifi and surprise surprise, we could log in here. I got the code. There was another fellow there and he could not seem to get on the wifi with his computer. They had been having problems so I was hopeful that I could – otherwise it was Gloria Jeans for me.

I typed furiously all afternoon and Greg played with photos, eventually sorting a way that he reorganized them into smaller files that would not take long to upload – therefore cutting the time  we had to fart around with the whole thing and could get on with having a holiday. I managed to get on the free wifi without a problem and quickly got rid of all those rubbish emails you get out of my in box.

Greg also had a look at the light in the caravan which seemed to be ok. The globe appeared to have nothing wrong with it – so we checked it out on battery mode instead of mains power – nothing. It must be a fuse. The trouble is where we expect the fuses are located is at the back of the fridge. This has a screwed, riveted and siliconned back to it on the outside of the van, therefore making it impossible to access. This quickly turned into a problem we would have to sort out when we got home.  An inconvenience. To solve this we decided to purchase a rechargeable camping lamp – it would come in handy for other camping trips. No problem.

We decided all be it a little late to go to check out Silverton which is 20km drive away. As the sun was setting we jumped in the car to check it out. It was pretty closed by the time we got there. It’s a very small town, much of it in ruins. The pub was the only sign of life other than some wild horses and emus on the way there. We took some photos and probably should have read all the bits and pieces and learned stuff but didn’t feel like it. They did have some old cars and things that were in the movie ‘Mad Max’ which I have only seen half of. Apparently the town has been used in a whole list of movies. Fancy that.

Then we did a really exciting thing – we went back to town and found a Woolworths and bought some stuff. We were planning to leave the next day so I wanted to get a few little bits for the freezer in case we were in another national park for a while. I had planned to do a vegetarian meal for Monday since we hadn’t done too much activity.

I made vegetarian chick pea curry – which is far from being one of Greg’s favourites but it packs a heap of veggies in and since he wasn’t feeling that great all day a good feed of veggies is just what you need. Well at least that’s what I told him.

By the time we got back to the camp it was dark and we had forgotten that our light didn’t work. Bugger – no matter it was head lamps again. Must remember to get a light tomorrow.

After our exciting dinner (!) and within the cramped confines of the van, we sat with our laptops back to back on the dinner table which was barely big enough and Greg continued to work on his images.

 Unbeknown to me at the time he managed to delete/hide/misplace all of my photos. This became apparent later. I would not be amused.

We hit the sack hoping that Greg would feel better tomorrow. I was very reluctant to leave a major centre with a husband who wasn’t feeling well and still has not had a diagnosis as to why he has an irregular heart beat and why he had a heart attack in the first place. It wasn’t like he felt unwell like you do with a crook guts or a cold or anything you can tell someone to get over themselves with – so I erred on the side of caution.