Bathurst to the OUTBACK

It was like something out of a Monty Python sketch. It was late at night when the rain had started falling. I lay in our Trakmaster, listening and thinking about the dirt track across the black soil we had slipped onto to get away from the bitumen and thrum of passing traffic. The narrow track ended at a steep muddy channel, so I knew that wasn’t an escape route.

Waking Viv up, I was greeted by, “You gotta be kidding!” That was a negative, so putting on our best bush night attire, we went out in the drizzle and fired up the ‘Cruiser. While Viv wandered down the track with a torch directing, I edged out of our narrow single lane track, dodging a tree and following the curl of the track, both sides of which were bordered by a shallow, muddy ditch. It would have been easy in the daylight, but in the pitch black it was another ballgame. It was a tense 10 minutes before we were back at a safer, firmer spot I could more easily get out of if the rain continued.

It did, and next morning we