Smithton to Crayfish Creek - Wed

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Smithton to Crayfish Creek

Started the day with a cup of tea and hot spa. Special day! Reluctantly packed up in the company of the little Blue Wrens and some very small dark brown wallaby kinda critters (Pademelons. Lovely!). This has been a gorgeous, secluded accommodation and we already can't wait to return.

We take a drive around some areas inland from Smithton that we are considering as an area we might like to live. One of them is called Irishtown, and is very pretty, but unfortunately the local football team are called "The Irishtown Canaries"...! (How are we supposed to get behind a team called that?) We make our way to Edith Creek and Scotchtown also. All good.

A short drive back down the road and we are back in Stanley. There are many wonderful old buildings to photograph and I can't stop gazing at the Nut - it would be amazing to live under the beetling brow of that splendid formation. We eat our prepacked leftover roast chicken sandwiches (yay!) in a little park in front of the seafood shop and admire the stumpy little lighthouse in the park - is it still a working lighthouse? Judging by the signs prohibiting anyone from tampering with it, I suspect it must be. The bottom of it contains a kind of diorama, displaying sand, shells, plastic sea creatures and posters of the sea life of the area. There is also the "Mercy Stone", a clay obelisk which a plaque says was sculpted for a local arts festival some while ago. It has four sides depicting in turn, the Holy Spirit, Mary, Jesus and Joseph. I like Joseph's depiction, showing him holding a carpenter's square. A lady also having a picnic in the park was being harassed by a large vocal group of seagulls and was saying "Be quiet! Go away!" to them.

We head back into the seafood shop with the giant lobster atop and buy a large fillet of blue grenadier - priced at $15 / kilo - $7 for enough for two. I suspect I am coming down with a cold - feel very tired and not very robust and I feel in need of some down time. Back on the road for the short drive to our accomodation for the next two nights - Crayfish Creek Caravan Park. Inside the office there is a deep concrete pit...which contains the fattest blue tongue lizard I have ever seen (actually, the only blue tongued lizard I have ever seen!). The young lad in charge tells me "she's pregnant!" Well, that explains it then! He tells me "You are in van 12 but I don't know which one it is" and hands me a key. On further enquiry he directs me to where three onsite vans are, but repeats that he does not know which one is no.12. I say "shall I just try the key and see which one it opens? " and he heartily agrees with this suggestion. Hmm.

The first van we try turns out to be no. 12. It is clean, quite well equipped with a large fridge, wall of mirror tiles, huge couch, TV and a perfectly functional cooking space (very important to us!) only lacking any kind of table space at all - no dining table, no coffee table, not even a little bedside table. We turn the TV on to check out what channels we receive and to see whether there is any prospect of watching any tennis tonight, and catch the end of what I later found out to be "Funny People" (Adam Sandler, Eminem, Ray Romano, Eric Bana amongst many others). Strange and inexplicable film. (Today I have read that it cost $71 million dollars to make - what the??)

This is a bushland caravan park, a bit unlike any I have seen before. We go for a bit of an explore, and follow winding paths through the bush and come across little hidden camps dotted here and there, all in little private groves of bush, private and out of sight of each other. I am a person who likes expansive views and I find it a little unsettling and a touch claustrophobic, but there are family groups with kids riding their bikes peacefully all round the park and like many Queensland caravan parks of the 70's and 80's, a large talking bird in a small aviary. This one is a lovely white Corella called Snow, and in the afternoon when a blind is pulled down on the front of Snow's cage he begins to talk in the voice of a friendly old lady. I hate to see birds in cages, and especially large birds in small cages, so I spend quite a bit of time communing with Snow. He likes company.

Dinner (after 9pm, when it is finally dark) is floured and fried blue grenadier fillets (skin on!), garlic cream pink eye potatoes, and mashed pumpkin. All good. This is my first fesh blue grenadier and I found it delicate in texture (the frozen examples I have had before have tended on the mushy side, and when I see how delicate it is when perfectly fresh, I can see why) and with a somewhat delicate flavour. Very nice but not as "fishy" as my very favourite kinds of fish.

We are receiving excellent reception of the station showing the Australian Open and finish the evening with the Fernando Verdasco vs. Janko Tipsarevic match - heaps more entertaining than Hewitt's match the night before. Into bed on beautiful sheets to sleep off the beginnings of this cold.

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