Leo and Beth on support, Tanya and me in the van. There are route decisions to make so the group is up at 6:40am or so, but not away until 9:30am. We will take the back roads, but I don't really participate since it doesn't affect me. I sit in the van all day and do nothing.
Once again I arrange to have the back seat as that worked well yesterday. We manage to bog the van in the "ditch", despite said ditch being a barely visible depression with sludge rather than water in it. We're not used to this wet stuff. Some nice men help us push the van out after I do a bit of digging and putting stuff under the wheels..
Naima and John are on the trike, which could be amusing. Predictably they don't leave until the van does and that only because John was already getting a little stressed.
Still on painkillers, which is not good. Chest pain or knee pain, pick one. Would be happier with just codeine but only have paracetamol combination tablets, not going to bother with a doctor even though we're going to the hospital again with Tanya. Do not see the point in explaining the problem, because I suspect it's unlikely they'd give me anything new in the drugs department (getting morphine tablets out of doctors is not easy in these drug-addict days). Do not want x-rays when I won't be here long enough to get help. Xrays don't help, but unless you're a sports physiologist it's apparently inconceivable that a knee problem could involve only soft tissue.
We take Tanya to a new doctor to get antibiotics, which lets us have tea and snacks in town which is nice. She has a white-tailed spider bite on her leg, probably, the antibiotics are in case it's an infected wound. Sunny scrounges us space in a community hall for the night, a fire brigade shed in Bejoording. After that it's 100km to Guildford, so we're going to do the closing circle in the community hall. It's also rainy so that will be good, having a closing circle under canvas would probably be a bit cold and wet.
I get grumpy in the evening, we didn't leave the lunch town until 5pm so dinner was late and I was hungry as well as pained. People go off to buy beer which further disrupts dinner, as that means we are going to wait for the fresh food they will also buy. We don't actually lack food, only fresh, easy to prepare food. Looks like we will carry the dried food out the end of the ride, as well as lots of chick peas and so on. And the wheat free pasta which no-one else can cook still. Cranky, grumpy, not happy. I pitch John's tent a little way away from the hall, constrained by how far I want to walk vs how close I want to be to the noise. I grovel up the hill to get cell phone reception and ring the Perth crew to find out what is going on.
I eat whatever is around, cobble together something rather than eat the rubbish that eventually arrives with the "dinner" label. Not sure at all what I'm missing in my diet, but whatever it is I'm not happy about the food still. Trouble is that nothing grabs me as smelling good in food-selling areas, so I'm not at all sure what's wrong. Maybe it's just the salt/ mineral problem from the water, maybe it's just the energy content and I could simply eat more. Who knows. Hot chips do seem to be one very nice food, so it could be fat, salt, or energy.
The evening is fairly lively, there is dancing by candlelight and various games and fooling around.
Previous Page The closing circle is another couple of big pages with a huge pile of notes on it, you might want to skip past it unless you like our meetings.