This past weekend saw tina b and I heading to a neck of the woods northwest of Melbourne called Grampians National Park. Its a wonderful little clump of hectares covered in gum trees, eucalyptus, and other types of out-backy goodness. Snakes, insects, fur bearers, and birds in every color of the rainbow infest this park as well.
Upon entering the park from the east the landscape shoots upward very fast. The terrain is jagged and volcanic. The thick covering of trees soften the foothills visually but make no mistake that the park is no joke. As you wind through the park’s east border and into the interior a wide expanse unfolds. An immense valley expands before you showing how big parks can be in this part of the world.
Our trip over to the Grampians was a little over a three hour drive from Melbourne. Friends, Michael and Amy, lent us their little Citroen for a couple of weeks so we were going to take advantage of the short time with the car and do some car camping.
In addition to the car we were being loaned camping gear that was in storage a few kilometers away. Since we were going to be camping in a few days we didn’t want to wait til the last minute to check out the gear so we went the Wednesday before our trip. Tina works during the day so, we headed over to the storage unit at night and hoped there would be lights in the unit itself. After getting lost a couple of times and crossing the wrong bridge, doubling back again we finally made it. There was some weird music being piped in over a bullhorn type speaker. It sounded really weird. Finding the storage unit we quickly saw there were no lights in the locker and proceeded to rummage through all the various things one keeps in storage, looking for things associated with camping.
Folding chairs? Check. Folding table? Check. Fishing pole? Sure, why not. Tent? Yup. Wait. Here’s another tent and a separate bag with some poles in it. Just take it all. OK, sleeping bags? Sleeping bags? Here’s one but… well here’s a giant down comforter. OK grab it. Cooking stove? Yup. Still in the box. Fuel!?!? Yes, here it is. After twenty minutes or so we pretty much had everything we could find piled high on a cart and proceeded back to the car
It took a while but we jammed everything in and headed home.
We left Friday around 3pm and made our way east. by the time we got to the park, it was getting dark on account we got started a little late. We arrived at the park entrance around 7pm. Due to the steep hills we were losing light pretty fast. We were also having trouble reading the map we had downloaded. It looked pretty detailed upon first examination. But, none of the landmarks were where they should have been and so finding our planned campground proved fruitless.
We pulled into an RV type park and headed into the office to ask directions. Looking around and realizing we weren’t going to get to our campground in the next fifteen minutes we bagged the search and just decided to stay where we were.
We paid the parking fee and headed down to our spot. We knew the first order of business was to get the tent up.
Now, I’m no Daniel Boone but I have set up my share of tents so I took up tent duty. Tina got on unpacking the car of all our cooking stuff. After getting what looked like the “complete” tent unpacked and laid out I started scratching my head. I knew that the quickest way to get this thing up was to find the instructions. Screw pride I wanted shelter. Flies were starting to get hungry and I can't stand flies hanging out on my face.
The tent erecting wasn’t going too good. The tent itself had no visible attachment points for the poles. The fly seemed to have some clips on it but it was a nice night out and I didn’t really want to have the fly on the tent.
I decided I should check the other tent’s bag thinking maybe there were some more tent parts to this one. When I pulled the second tent out of its bag I quickly realized this was one of those massive shelter tents that you set up over a picnic table. This wasn’t going to work. Seeing my failing attempt to provide shelter Tina came to help out.
We tried to use our collective tent experience and could not figure out why the tent would not attach to the poles. Now it was just about dark and we were out of ideas. We decided we should at least set up the fly since it seemed to be the only thing that had attachments for poles. We we’re dreading having to sleep just under a fly but we wanted some kind of shelter.
After getting the fly up I crawled in to check it out. I saw in the faint light of my headlamp that there we’re little tabs on the walls inside the fly. WTF?? Well as in turns out, Australian tents have a fly first set up then the tents hang from the walls inside. Completely backwards!
Right. Now we have shelter. On to our beds. I grabbed the sleeping bag and the comforter. Crawled in. Spread the bag down figuring it would work as a pad. Good thing because it was one of Michael’s son’s bag and it was kids sized. Next to spread out the comforter. I unzipped the clear plastic case and reached in. what? A pillow? Oh sweet, we’ll have an extra pillow. No wait there’s two pillows …. Three… fou… six pillows!?!?!??! Fuck!
After letting this settle in, we decided at least we could sleep on all the pillows and since it was not that cold out we, wouldn't freeze with just the kid sized sleeping bag. My feet would have to be uncovered the whole night.
Alright. Lesson learned. Look through all borrowed camping stuff well before embarking.
Now we had to think about food. We were both pretty over it. We wanted to do something easy. We took out the camping stove saw on the box's picture that it not only had a burner feature but it also had a grill top. We could bbq some pork chops we brought. We pulled out the stove opened it up and … no grill for the stove….
Ok, I see how this is going to go.
Fortunately, off on the other side of the campgrounds there was a bbq pit. We gathered up our supplies and headed off to the pit. Only, this pit was a gas grill. OK. No need for the coals we brought. Lets see... gas tank seems to have gas. But the knobs were all broken and wouldn’t turn the burners on. Hmm… Lets see what happens when I turn on the tank. Gas seems to be coming out of the burners. OK, matches. Well one of the burners works and the griddle part seems to be working. But you can’t adjust any of the burners. Well, we’ll just have to have the griddle on while we cook the chops. After about twenty minutes cooking the griddle's residual grease really started to smoke.
Our chops finally done we started to the communal tables to eat and take a breather from our long day. We cheers’d each other with some fine (cheapest) beers I brought. After devouring our meal. We headed for bed. I turned on the camping lamp and got out Telex from Cuba for some bedtime reading. I read aloud so tina could follow along and after about three minutes, Tina was asleep.
I turned out the lamp and stretched out my exposed toes. Finished the last couple of sips from my beer and was out.
End of part I
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