Well, I was planning on getting up some of our pictures from sailing and snorkeling in the Whitsundays during our drive today, but…
… the drive itself was so typical of our overall Australian experience that I feel moved to comment.
(Warning: If you don’t happen to be related to the clan, this may not hold your interest. In fact, even if you are related, it still might not….)
The minivan started rolling at 10:07 — not bad. Tom was only slightly frustrated that I hadn’t loaded the directions to our next destination onto GPS before getting into the car.
10:08: My mother began to sing “On the Road Again.” Well, actually, she sang precisely four words, then filled in the rest of the tune — well, actually, a tune, not especially convincing — with dee-dee-dee-dums.
10:09: “I wish we had the lyrics; then we could all do a singalong!” she chirped. “Oh, me too,” replied Tomas. “It’s a shame, really.”
10:10: Willie Nelson’s version of the song on YouTube started loading.
10:14: YouTube hit 43%, and I figured that’s good enough. I hit the play button, and instantly an uproar of protest launched, whereby everyone in the back two rows complained that they couldn’t see the itty-bitty screen due to glare. By the time that settled down, we’d reached the end of the buffered load and have to start all over again. Interest waned.
10:34: As we hurtled through the town of Bowen, an enormous fiberglass ovoid loomed to our left. “Look! A Big Egg!” Stella cried out. Tom decelerated obligingly.
10:35: As the minivan pulled into the parking lot, we realized it was actually a Big Mango.
10:36: As we all jumped out of the van, I noticed that the sole other vehicle in the parking lot, a muscled pickup with caravan in tow, had a license plate worthy of note. Just as I got the camera ready, the couple associated with the truck returned from the gift shop, where they’d doubtless found tasteful mango-themed mementoes of their stop.
10:37: He cheerfully obliged when I asked if I could take a picture of him with his license plate * …
10:38: … and then offered to take a picture of all of us with the Big Mango:
10:43: Back on the Road Again. My mother successfully added one more line to her repertoire. I checked to see if more Willie Nelson had loaded, but the caching seemed to stop unless I held the phone aloft, stroking the screen continuously to keep the connection alive. Who has time for that?
10:49: Somebody mentioned something about capers, and naturally that precipitated a heated discussion of where capers come from. Hypotheses came rolling in. Sheila: Somewhere in Scandanavia. Charlie: Somewhere in the Mediterranean.
10:50: I pulled up a cooking site, which informed us that capers come from the early bud of the Capparis spinosa evergreen shrub, native to — sure enough — the Mediterranean. Charlie scores!
10: 58: Sheila said, “Ooh – now’s a great time to review the 100 Films you Must See Before You Die!” This was a feature in The Courier-Mail, the local paper in our prior stop Airlie Beach, which she had begun to read aloud over breakfast, until we agreed that we’d be better able to give it the attention it clearly deserved if it weren’t competing with the Clean-Up, Pack-Up, Check-Out and Load-the-Van routine.
Now we had the leisure to play the game. This is how the game went: She gave us the category (“Undisputed Classics,” “Romance,” “War,” etc.), the year it came out, and author Leigh Paatch’s one-line description. We then tried to guess the movie. Once we guessed it, or gave up, then we kvetched about whether it really was that good, or about how although we hadn’t actually seen it it couldn’t possibly be that good, or that it better belonged in a different category. Or something else.
Here’s a re-enactment of just one round:
Category: Action. Year: 1986. Paatch précis, as read by Sheila: “So 80s that it almost hurts, but the ripping aerial combat sequences-” Tom, cutting in: “–TOP GUN!” Sheila: “Let me finish, Tom… ‘the ripping aerial combat sequences and the goofy br0-mance of Maverick (Tom Cruise) and –’ “ Tom, cutting in again: “It’s not Top Gun? I was sure it’d be Top Gun –“ Sheila: “Well it is Top Gun, but my question is, what’s a ‘bro-mance? I thought Tom Cruise was—” Tom: “But I said Top Gun!” Charlie: “I don’t think Tom Cruise was in Top Gun. I’m betting it was-” Sheila: “Of course he was! That’s not the question! The question is-” Tom: “Well if I said Top Gun, why did you say no?” Charlie: “Well did actually you see Top Gun? I don’t believe I ever saw it—“ Sheila: “No, of course I never saw it – I hate Action films – but I don’t need to see it; it says RIGHT HERE, TOM CRUISE.”
You’ll recall that this was a list of 100 films. So that obviously held us for a good forty minutes.
11:46: By the time the movie game was winding down, and we were starting to keep our eyes out for possible lunch stops (Australian towns, we’ve learned, are so far apart from one another that you blow by one at your peril – there may not be another option for 130 kilometers), we sped past a Big Watermelon. Well, naturally we had to stop.
11:47: It wasn’t that big, really, but we snapped our picture and then stopped at the adjacent roadside fruit stand just to be polite.
11:49: The young woman selling fruit, upon hearing of our admiration for the Big Fruit scattered across her fatherland, said, “Aww… it’s a right shame you couldn’t see the Big Pumpkin we just got in, hey?… We haven’t had time to put it up yet ‘cuz of the harvest, but here’s what it looks like-“ and then she whipped out her phone, and sure enough in no time at all pulled up a picture of a Big Pumpkin, far bigger and frankly a good deal more impressive than the watermelon they already had out front. “We’ve got all the pieces back there in the shed,” she added, gesturing at a sizeable outbuilding a few hundred meters back. “You’re welcome to go back and have a look.”
Needless to say it was mighty tempting, the prospect of seeing unassembled sections of Big Pumpkin scattered about a working farmshed, but Tomas was waiting in the van and we still had kilometers to go before we slept, so I thanked her sincerely but said that sadly we had to be moving on.
And that’s just one single morning.
Other favorite pastimes are to note unusual topographical features…
Now that’s a funny bump… wonder how that got there?
… and speculate about their formation. This one, for example, Sheila identified with perfect certainty as a “drumlin.” Since it is pretty well established that within this family, neither certainty nor emphatic delivery is particularly correlated with accuracy, that too warranted an internet search. Turns out a drumlin is indeed a geologic formation… just not that formation. We haven’t succeeded yet in identifying this type — please let us know, if you know.
On days when Captain Daddy doesn’t begrudge a few kilometers off the road, we sometimes stop for lunch in a pretty spot:
Grasstree Beach, somewhere north of Yeppoon
In the absence of any other information, we thought perhaps these were the namesake grasstrees
Wish you were here…
On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been.
Seein’ things that I may never see again
Dee dee dee dee dee-dee dee-dee dum…
* Upon reading this post, Tomas reprimanded me for not making clear that Manly is an Australian rugby team. He thinks that fact constitutes important context for the license plate. But here’s the thing… I didn’t know that Manly was a rugby team.
Family Gap Year 
This is probably my favorite blog post of yours yet. Certainly evokes memories of travel with the Klem Klan… My favorite line being, of course, “it is pretty well established that within this family, neither certainty nor emphatic delivery is particularly correlated with accuracy.”
I’m excited to see all of you dorks next week. 🙂
Aww… thanks, sweetheart. We miss you! See you soon.
Fun to get a glimpse into the van. And I like Emma’s comment as well (‘dorks’). The repartee between your family is as enjoyable as always.
Also, reader(s) would also like to know how you handle “screen time” and more specifically, do you limit it? Or do the kiddos get to ‘free range’ and use at their leisure. And if they do, how in the world do you get them to see what’s going on around them, and transition to all the exciting mammoth fruit and vegetable roadside landmarks?
Well, at home, there are gizmo limits. On the road… there are enough natural limits (no wifi, no ability to charge, no time) that it’s not much of an issue. Sometimes transitions can be hard (particularly when we’re having a rare moment of leisure in an apartment or bungalow that feels like home, and they just.want.to.hang), but Big Fruit? Come on… who doesn’t get a thrill out of Big Fruit?
And Ellen’s trained the whole family really, really well: when any of us are called to a photo op, we put our differences aside, put our game faces on, and look at the camera.
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