Beth and Mark's Gap Year 2014: Running from the rain 16 Feb to 21 Feb

When I last signed off I indicated (perhaps a little smugly) that trifling matters such as weather were not going to get in our way. I suspect that Mother Nature caught wind of my boastful attitude and decided to teach me a lesson. Torrential and persistent rain and fog which London would be proud of were sent to test us and despite our best efforts we failed to overcome these obstacles. I didn’t capture an image of us standing under shelter at Govett’s Leap in full walking regalia (including walking poles – but more on that later) waiting for the fog to lift and the rain to abate. If I had, it would have been a forlorn picture indeed.

Our plan after Katoomba was to head to Wollemi National Park just a little further north, but all indications were that the weather was as unrelenting there as it was at Katoomba, so after two days confined to indoors we decided to pack our trailer (in the teeming rain) and head inland until the rain stopped – and there we would set up camp. Our initial thoughts were to stay at Bathurst, but after Beth broke all records driving around the Mount Panorama circuit (fastest ever lap by a Jeep towing an Ultimate camper and driven by a woman named Lisbeth), we felt there was little more to achieve in Bathurst and we decided upon Hill End as the place to stay.

Our spirits were high until we opened the trailer and discovered why it is not a great idea to pack up in heavy rain – basically everything gets wet. Luckily the sun was shining and the camp ground was well equipped to allow us to repurpose the site as a laundry. Mattresses, pillows, cushions, food containers and the like were all strewn around the site in sunny spots and were dry within a couple of hours, by which time our dampened spirits had also dried.

Hill End as it turned out was an inspired choice. It is a gold mining town which rose quickly (8,000 inhabitants, 4 churches and 27 pubs) in the late 19^th century (on the back of gold discoveries of course), and declined just as quickly a few years later when the gold got harder to find. Happily, much of the town remained intact after its decline, and it is now a lovely little heritage listed town which is far enough off the beaten track to dissuade most tourists from visiting. The language of choice in the Katoomba caravan park was German and the bulk or tourists riding the cable car were Asian. Not so at Hill End where there were only a sprinkling of tourists, mostly like our own good selves. There was however a group of art students from a Sydney university in town (Hill End has links to quite a few famous Australian artists and is evidently a drawcard for aspiring artists) who we kept bumping into, and I guess it is fair to say that they speak a language just as foreign as German.

After two very enjoyable (and rain free) days at Hill End, we decided to try again for Wollemi National Park, and after a very pleasant morning walk we commenced packing up, which we were just 10 minutes from completing when the heavens opened up. More sogginess ensued, and Beth and I contemplated the notion of marketing ourselves as rainmakers. Everything west of the divide is currently parched in NSW, so although we were again cursing the rain, in truth it was a blessing and we should not complain. Needless to say the rain persisted and as we approached Wollemi with the windscreen wipers working at full tilt, we decided that Wollemi did not want us, and we would visit another time. Instead we headed for our next planned destination - Lake Macquarie (which is just south of Newcastle), and that is where we are currently.

The weather has so far been quite kind to us (thank you Mother Nature), but we are bracing ourselves for an abrupt change once we start packing up to leave. Because we have lost a couple of days walking this has given us the opportunity to do some catching up. Yesterday we walked the Fernleigh Trail, which is a 17km former rail track which runs from Lake Macquarie into the Newcastle suburbs, and today we walked the final 21km of the Great North Walk (from Warners Bay to the Newcastle Wharf). The Great North Walk, which is 250 km from Sydney to Newcastle is one which we will definitely tackle sometime in the future, so it was good to get a little taste of it. All this walking has restored our average a little, but we are both a little weary and tomorrow we may just settle for a 10km stroll.

Upon reading my blog, members of my family have chided me for my treatment of Beth. They say I have developed caricatures with Beth being unfairly cast in the role of either villain or fool, and myself the poor victim and tragic hero of this villainy. In some respects I plead guilty as charged, and maybe just occasionally I have overstated some things and understated others (perhaps in my favour), but rest assured I know that without Beth my adventures would be misadventures – and I do know how lucky I am that she tolerates my many frailties and failings and steers me in the right direction when I start to drift. As I have said in the past, I would be lost, both figuratively and practically without Beth (my sense of direction is showing no signs of improvement as I age).

When last we spoke I mentioned that we are each taking specific responsibilities. I have appointed myself as Chief Technology Officer. This is a role for which I would consider myself eminently qualified having spent a lifetime dabbling in matters technical and even making a half decent living from it. Turns out that alas, I am not quite as well equipped for this role as I thought, and I have been somewhat challenged by the vast array of supposedly integrated technologies we are using in our travels. We have a GPS which has misled us on many occasions and has now been banished to the glove box; we have 2 iPads and 2 iPhones which are integrated through the “cloud”, but we never quite know what they are doing or how much precious data they are consuming; we have a little Windows laptop, which keeps demanding Microsoft updates which our meagre data rations cannot support; we have a camera which takes great pictures and has WiFi capabilities but doesn’t seem to work nicely with anything else; and the list goes on.

By the end of this trip I will have all this technology properly harnessed, but at the moment I am not making a great fist of it. Last week when I got a new monthly 500mb allotment of data on my prepaid iPhone, I decided I would use my phone as a tethered modem for the laptop to upload a few photographs to the internet. What I hadn’t considered was that the laptop would automatically download updates, and that my iPad was lurking in the background waiting for a known connection to latch onto so it could perform backups. Before I realised what was happening my data had gone. For my sins, for the next month I have to rely upon others for internet access. I wouldn’t say Beth is smug, but she does seem to be using her phone a lot lately – and effectively to boot. I am a little concerned that I may be usurped by Beth in my position of CTO.

We have a couple more nights at Lake Macquarie before we move on to Myall Lakes National Park and hopefully some more bush walks (with the emphasis on bush). Tomorrow I have been promised a visit to McDonalds – not for the food but the WiFi – so that I can post this blog and perhaps do a few more maintenance things which require internet access. We may be turned away if we arrive with all our devices in tow. Wish me luck.