| Well, I just spent two nights at Wairo... |
[Jul. 21st, 2003|08:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  peaceful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Blow Up the Pokies, The Whitlams | ] |
NOTE: This is yesterday's entry.... I'm just getting sick of backdating entries.
I love Wairo. It's so peaceful.
I suppose you people would like to know what Wairo actually is... (Beware, this'll probably get a little florid...)
My family have a holiday house down past Ulladulla... It's one of a couple of little fibro shacks at the top of a cliff face. There's a couple of paths down the cliff, and at the bottom is a sandy yellow beach. It not that difficult to be the only people on that beach, especially in the winter time. In the summer, surfers take on the track in their four wheel drives to visit; but the beach is big enough that nobody minds the other users.
The track to Wairo is epic in itself, especially when it rains. It's a dirt track winding through bush; if you tend to end up carsick, you will be by the end (especially since it goes up and down as well as sharp turns). People have no idea how to drive through it, so it's often churned up by cars that have driven straight through the puddles, often only narrowly missing getting bogged. We used to have a 2WD Camry, and when it'd been raining, Mum, Poppa (the dog) and I would all have to get out and walk when it got to the serious puddles to reduce the weight of the car in the hope it might make it through. (Dad always takes over the steering wheel...)
The house itself is a fibro shack (as I said), dating back to the thirties. The only water's what's in the tanks, so if you waste water, you're in trouble. There's a pit loo... And no electricity, except when you have a generator. We don't have the generator, but even if we did, it can't really cope any more. It probably needs replacing, but no one can really be bothered, so we make do with candles, gas lamps, and wood fires in the winter. The padlocks we use to lock the doors often rust shut (especially with the salt spray adding to the corrosiveness), and we always seem to forget to bring WD40, so the first day's often a 'drive up, struggle with all the locks, realise you can't get half of them open, then spend the rest of the day ferrying between Ulladulla and Wairo for the things you've forgotten' day. Of course, as you open more rooms, you realise you're missing more things, so you send the driver back again. (It's like those computer games: turn this lever, hit this button, then defeat the dragon to get the key to open the door to the next level...) We do have a fridge... It runs on Kerosene... It either barely works, or freezes everything, especially the things you'd prefer in a liquid state, thank you very much... Like Coca-Cola... There's another fridge, as well, but I'll write about that a little later.
People constantly break in; we padlock the doors, but that's not really an issue. If they really want to get in, they just break the doors or walls. It's fibro, remember, and fibro breaks fairly easily. The last people that broke in basically took a mixing bowl, a rug, and the saw. We can only assume they were having a party on the beach or something.
We call it Wairo, because that's the name of the beach... There's also Shelly Beach just around the headland, which has millions of pieces of shell instead of sand. But everywhere seems to have a Shelly Beach or two; that's Wairo's.
Ok, so now you have a picture of the place.
Something else I should probably also make a note of before I launch into a point by point description of the trip: this time we invited Chris S. (and kids) along. Chris S. is one of Dad's collegues... He's in a slightly different faculty (Maths/Computing vs Dad's Computing Science) but they're good friends, and they both went to the retreat (see the next paragraph). Chris S.'s surname is actually Johnson, but in Computing department, there's two Chris Johnsons, so they're identified by their middle initial: Chris S. and Chris W. He also brought along his daughter, Madison, who is in Year Nine, and his son, Miles, who's a little younger.
Dad's been at a "Faculty Retreat" (Read: "Let's all try and figure out what we're going to do next semester. Alcohol may help.") in Wollongong since Wednesday, so Mum and I picked him up on our way down on Friday. We were actually running an hour late when we picked him up... Mum wanted to go to work to prove that she was there, because currently she's earned '9 hours of leave' and didn't want to waste them. She got held up, so she didn't get home until 12 o'clock, and we were hoping to leave by 12:30. I think we left at 1 o'clock. We picked up lunch at a Macca's drive through somewhere, her having chicken nuggets at each set of traffic lights... I think we caught every red light from here to Wollongong.
When we got to Wollongong, Mum realised she didn't actually know which hotel Dad was staying at, and couldn't find the paper she had written it on... She knew it was on the beach, though, so we ended up cruising along the beachside road, trying to find a suitably large-looking hotel. Eventually he flagged us down.
We get to Wairo, looking suitably apologetic because we were supposed to be meeting Chris S. there, except we beat him to it, so we started opening doors... We got the kitchen door open with only a minium of irritation, but the other doors were a different story altogether. One of the doors we managed to get it open by unlocking one of the padlocks and unscrewing the other from the door (We did get it open eventually... Think Sunday afternoon.). The laundry door we got open by pouring metho over it then leaving it for a while. The top door we just kept twisting till it gave. And the last one, we only got open after Chris and Dad had stuffed about with it for a while.
Dinner on the first night was Spag Bol (my family cooking). We always have Spag Bol at Wairo... We make the bolongaise about a week in advance, then freeze it to defrost at cooking time. It also makes good jaffles for lunch the next day.
After dinner, Dad and I taught/reminded Chris and Miles how to play Mah Jongg... After a couple of games, we told them about some of the limit hands. They are really weird hands that are very specific, and are worth practically nothing except that they're worth HEAPS. And I mean heaps. The best hands Dad or I can do is worth up to about 190 points (including doubles). Limit hands are generally worth about 3000 points. But the actual tiles aren't worth anything, and if you didn't know the pattern, for most, you'd chuck it immidiately. Several have to be done ENTIRELY in the hand... And trust me, that's hard. After we'd finished playing Mah Jongg, we sat and chatted about various things... Particularly the family feud constantly surrounding the property. We gave a couple of examples, including The Gas Fridge. Now, at Wairo, as I already said, there's a very old kerosene fridge that either barely works or works too well. BUT, there is also another fridge. It's just, for some reason, the Colvilles aren't allowed to use or know about it. We do know about it because last time we came down, one of the neighbours was chattering on about "Oh, isn't it a wonderful job they've done, hiding the fridge?" And we're like, "Fridge?". It sortof inspired Chris... I'll explain how when I get to it.
Next morning, I woke up at... I don't know... 6:30? 7ish? Anyway. Parents set up the woodfire stove in the kitchen, so the place was actually semi-warm. I had my usual breakfast of juice and cereal. The milk and juice were both lukewarm... I'm used to that, with the juice, at least, because I often have it straight out of the cupboard at home. (So I'm lazy. Sue me.) But the milk was warmer than I'm used to, even though it was still slightly chilled since it had been in the Esky.
At 8:30 we woke Chris and Miles up (Dad put Poppa on Chris's bed... Hey, they ASKED to be woken up at 8:30...)... By 8:45 they'd actually got up enough come down to the kitchen. They spent most of the time by the fire. Parents started cooking toast, and Madison buttered them (When she got up... It took her a lot longer than it took Chris and Miles.).
After breakfast, Mum, Dad and I headed to Ulladulla. I wanted to go to Funland arcade... And they had shopping to do. I bought 25 tokens... And I only ended up winning a measly 105 tickets. Normally I can get like 120 and still have enough tokens left over to go on the dodgems and take Dad with me. I really need to practise. I swear it was the alligator's fault, though! They have this Whack-A-Mole game... Except it's alligators, and if you don't hit them fast enough, they go "Chomp" and you lose points. I hit that stupid alligator like five times each time and it still didn't acknowledge it. I should be able to get at least eighty on that game... I think my best ended up being something atrocious like sixty-five. *Hangs head in shame* It was only on the way home that we realised we'd forgotten the kero bottle and left it back at the house.
When we got back, Chris decided he wanted to have a go a the panel hiding The Gas Fridge. So he unscrewed the screws, and then proceeded to push, pull, and otherwise manhandle it until he managed to get it a good fifteen to twenty centimetres from the wall, and we all had a stickybeak. That is one very cool- and very new- looking fridge. We then had an argument about what we should do then... If we took the panel out any further, there was a good chance we wouldn't be able to get it back in. Eventually, they put it all back together... But we had been giving some serious thought to sticking a note to the front saying something to the effect of "Hi! Love the new fridge! When can we use it? Love, the Colvilles." But we decided there was too much chance of someone else using it and being seriously confused by it. *Pouts* No fun...
Lunch was jaffles... I had a couple of baked bean jaffles with ham, and then an apple jaffle. Apple jaffles involve chopping up apples into smallish pieces, adding them, then adding large amounts of sugar before sealing it and cooking. They're great served with cream. Clean the plate first, though... Nothing like tomato sauce on your apple jaffle.
Chris and Miles drove to Ulladulla, to buy more Kero, and a couple of other things we'd forgotten... Like washers for the tap in the laundry that refused to work.
I kicked a volleyball to Madison and back for a while in the afternoon, while we discussed various things... Mostly our taste in music. I think I've converted her to Something Corporate and Mest... But whether she'll actually do anything about it is another matter entirely.
Just before dark, we all went looking for firewood (Except Mum... She was doing something in the house.). Dad and Chris went crashing around in the bush, and Miles and Madison hauled what Chris dragged out over to the house... I was a smart cookie instead. I remembered that, in the summertime, we removed all the twigs, sticks, and whatever else up the track to reduce the fire danger. So I went looking for one of those piles, and got a number of the larger sticks from it.
After we'd hauled in enough wood, we then had to break it into pieces small enough that we could put them into the woodfire stove; no mean feat when you realise that Chris had been breaking small trees two add to the pile. Dad sawed the really big ones up, while the kids broke the smaller ones by standing on them.
On the second evening, the Mah Jongg game involved Dad teaching Madison how to play, and Chris, Miles, and me playing for ourselves. I kept getting really atrocious hands... And making pairs just after the second one had been chucked. After Chris left to cook dinner, Dad took his place and left Madison to play on her own. Eventually we had to stop playing, because everyone was paying very little in the way of attention. In five discards, there'd be three ones wrongly named. I was ready to stop in the game before we did, actually... But anyway.
Dinner on the second night was chicken with mushrooms... Except I asked to not have mushrooms. Mmmmm... Chicken...
Chris was reading a book called New World by Gillian Cross... It caught my fancy, but he was saying that he had to finish it before he went home. So the next morning, I filched it and read it. It's about a girl that is completely entranced by a virtual reality game called New World. It's very cool, actually.
Everyone else went for a walk... But walks tend to bore me senseless, so I stayed inside and kept my Game Boy company... After all, I wouldn't want it to get cold and lonely, would I?
Lunch was jaffles again... Except a couple of people had sandiwiches as well as/intead of jaffles.
After lunch, we had the task of getting the place clean again... Basically, everyone was in charge of their own rooms, and the family rooms were a free-for-all. I managed to escape most of it... I had to get my stuff back into the bag, and by doing that, I messed up the sweeping Madison had done so carefully, so I had to do that over. Then I started hauling everything out to the car. Hence: minimum cleaning, and I still kept busy, so they couldn't tell me off! YAY!
Once everything had been stuffed into the car, including the rubbish bag that we chucked at the tip a couple of ks down the way, we headed off. The drive home took us till about 6:30 PM... And it was punctuated by arguments between Dad and me about music. We hate each other's music, and he always drives, so he gets final say in every music choice. At about half past five, Mum took over the driving; he couldn't cope any more.
Mum didn't want to cook, so on the way home, we passed through Concord and got dinners for ourselves at one of those areas where they have McDonalds, KFC, Subway, and god knows what else in the same general vicinity. Dad and I got KFC, Mum bought a wrap from a little Turkish take-away.
We got home, ate dinner, then removed everything from the car. Most of it is still strewn around the house. Sometime we'll sort it out.
Enough, children?
-Mmaster |
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