Just been watching morning TV and scribbling notes for the recipe for Mango Mania…sounds and looks delicious, made with crab meat and lime juice. I have post-it notes with recipes from TV and magazines dotted all around the house, promising meals that would just be heaven on a plate, so why is it that here in Australia we get the WORST fast food in the world??? We have just done a 1,000 km road trip at the weekend, and when we called into some of these one horse towns, ready for a nice lunch or whatever, we are offered pies, deep fried seafood and oil, pastry and more oil. They say it is because their main source of trade are the truckies and we all know about truckies’ physiques…but it’s so silly for here in Jetty road in Glenelg, cafes are out doing themselves to provide more delicious yuppie menus than their neighbours. I had a pizza the other night, which consisted of a forest load of mushrooms on a bed of lemon aioli…it was to DIE for. Not a hint of compressed mozzarella anywhere! Oh to be in Italy where they specialise in ‘slow’ food!

The road trip took us down past the Coorong, a vast national park that is made up of salt pans, separated from the sea by huge sand dunes. We had hoped to see lots of sea birds, but were disappointed, although we did see a huge colony of pelicans. We stopped at Chinaman’s Wells and saw where these exiles from Hong Kong came in the 1850s and marched for miles in the search for Victorian gold. They often died along the way.

So much for birds…all we saw were murders of crows patrolling the verges, pecking at all the road kill. I noticed one had its head buried in the body of one of its dead friends…not a very discerning diner. Not like magpies, they have funerals for each other, according to some article I read, they apparently gather and lay down twigs beside their dead pal.

Whilst we had lunch we watched some very cheerful sparrows munching on a graveyard of insects that had met their end on our vehicle’s number plate!

We actually had lunch in Kingston, it was labelled, ‘The Best Middle Sized Town’. How funny. We turned a corner and were confronted with Larry the Big Lobster…seemed a good idea to take a break!

On on to Robe, where the sea bombards three corners of the town, and where the surfies like to come and compete.

I was intrigued with the lighthouse, built again in the middle of the last century and where rockets with rope were stored and shot off the rock to sinking vessels.  Poor stricken souls were then hauled back to shore in baskets. Sounds very precarious, and after witnessing the sea and high tide I wonder how many were actually saved.

We stayed in Mount Gambier in the State’s south east and nearly froze to death in our cabin. We did visit the famous Blue Lake which was quite beautiful.

In the night I had to pay a ‘little visit’ and in the morning John noticed a squashed spider beside the loo. Aaaargh. Just as well I didn’t put the light on.

The Highlight of the trip were the Naracoorte Caves. Just when I thought I knew everything, suddenly a trip down under the ground into limestone palaces of incredible beauty changed all that. We were confronted with a fossil bed, the size of an Olympic swimming pool, full of bones of creatures that had fallen down holes and died 500,000 years ago. Palaeontologists had constructed models from the bones they found of the ‘megafauna’ creatures that are now extinct…marsupial lions, and leaf eating kangaroos, and snakes of 6m in length. They think they died out about 50,000 yrs ago.

It made it so real to actually see the creatures recreated and standing by the bones that have still to be processed. When the guide turned out the light, it was terrifyingly black, and I tried to imagine poor Skippy falling down, breaking his leg and finding himself on a bed of bones. They say the stress would have killed him in 24 hours…still quite a long time.

Needless to say on Monday we were both feeling like floppy noodles, and I bravely returned to the doc to get my stitches out of my lip…another biopsy for a possible BCC, but happily this time all the pain and inconvenience was diagnosed as a nodular granulomatous (!!!!) whatever!

John went back to work, and there has been a spate of malicious behaviour in the car park…tyres being slashed etc. Fortunately he hasn’t been affected. The job is nearly complete, and should be finished on schedule by the end of September. Then we will have to see what happens next. In the meantime I am making great progress with my embroidery project, went to class yesterday and sewed up lots of my patchwork hexagons to make a frame. Goodness knows what it’s going to be yet; hopefully it will just evolve into something!

Tomorrow it is Spring. I shall look forward to that!