FLASHBACK -– A Stony Lunch - Still 9 October

After all the excitement of being bogged, we still had not had lunch. Darren and I left our deep sandy tracks by the side of the road with grumbling stomachs. We continued to look for somewhere to stop. It was still a sandy track but had little shade, the trees were too sparse, and even after what we had been through, lunch with shade is always the ideal. After about 15 minutes of further driving, we decided that we would stop after the next corner – REGARDLESS of shade. We were determined.
As luck would have it, the next dip and corner drove us out onto a wide stony plain. We would have had to be under a millimetre in height, to catch some shade. Still, the up side was that a stony plain meant that driving off the track was OK. We were travelling on the Pedirka Track, the aboriginal meaning of pedirka is ‘hailstones’ – which gives you an idea of the landscape, though very few stones were loose; they were all embedded into the ground.

I made sandwiches while Darren got out the compressor to blow up the tyres again. The plain was like a vast driveway with smooth red pebbles concreted into it. As I ate my 28th lunch of the trip, I thought that this is one odd country, with its diverse landscapes just around the corner from each other. After being bogged in the sand a quarter of an hour ago, now I was on a Mosman drive.