Post-script to the Final Ride: A Long Way 'Home', and Settling into Pepper-Packin'
Hello, Sorry for the delay, the long-suffering keyboard has finally give up the ghost... I am typing with an onscreen one. The word 'onscreen' just then took approx 1 minute to write. Anyway, this is the post-final-ride final ride. The one that takes us up to where we will be living and working for the next 6 months. We left Phil and Karolina after a week in Surfers Paradise, with the tanned surf boys running about barefoot and the skimpily clad promoter-girls in bikinis and gold platforms. We meandered along an alternative route back up north to Ayr on some very good dirt tracks. They were places where even the 8-year olds wore cowboy hats, where the service station women stop just short of actually growling at you, and where homesteads were called things like 'Why Not'. (As far as I was concerned there were some very good answers to that. They included '1. snakes', '2. wretched desert', '3. total lack of drink...