Saturday, 16 April
While we're more or less road trip veterans, there's still the odd trauma that can throw a spanner in the works, and most of them involve the failure to turn off electrical devices or the omission of some important item of luggage.
Still, having encountered most of the likely suspects already, and with the benefit of the Holiday Planner spreadsheet in Numbers, we know which electrical items to check obsessively, with particular reference to the stove and ensuring everything that can safely be unplugged, i.e. just about everything except the bar fridge, the big fridge and the wine fridge (is there an emerging theme there, or what?) has been unplugged and I can be reasonably sure that I've got everything that's on the spreadsheet.
I suggested Madam might care to avail herself of the packing list on the spreadsheet, a suggestion declined because she'd prefer to work from a written list, but around seven on Saturday morning, with breakfast out of the way I started ferrying items out to the car, dodging four furry felines suffering the delusion there was some possibility of being fed.
There was, of course, no possibility of frenzied feeding since the opened containers of cat food had been consigned to their rightful owner, who's happy to place the feeding station at our place because it's a more cat friendly environment. There may be those inclined to scoff at that suggestion, but I'd point out cats belonging to three sets of neighbours, coming from both the northern and western sides of the Little House of Concrete have decided our pseudo jungle is a more desirable location than their official domicile.
The four of them, Mother Alison, who goes through life in a state of total unimpressedness, and the three kittens alternated between polite anticipation and scurrying avoidance of large humans carrying assorted items and could, should I feel so inclined, be blamed for a couple of items we failed to accomplish as intended.
Having completed the journey between Bowen and points south so often, there's rarely anything that happens in transit that attracts the attention unless something has gone wrong, and despite our best endeavours invariably something has been overlooked.
The first was brought to my attention by Madam, who asked whether I'd turned off the modem, which I hadn't because I'd been told that someone had already turned off and unplugged everything in the kitchen and the living room. The modem, printer and bar fridge all run off the same power point in the kitchen, so that's my excuse, the judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
The second was Madam's failure to set the trip recorder on the odometer to zero, an oversight she noted as we passed Ooralea race course, which is two hundred kilometres into the trip, so while we can calculate things by adding two hundred to the reading it won't be exact but it'll have to do.
Southern trips usually involve turning off the main highway just south of Kuttabul and doglegging through the Pioneer Valley by way of Marian and Pleystowe, rejoining the highway at Mackay's City Gates, which are right beside the race track, which mightn't save too much distance but avoids Mackay's traffic lights and notorious traffic snarls.