Day 22 | Nornalup Road: sitting still, reading a book as the rain comes, mostly, down

rest day

I wandered around the campsite, ie, the obscure location where this tent is pegged, this morning, almost thinking this horrendous weather forecast might be a hoax. The sun is shining but it does look a little ominous in the direction the weather will be coming.

The vegetation around is mostly shoulder height, scrubby, prickly, small leaved, greenery, the odd scattering of paperbark trees, well suited to wet feet, botanically speaking, and where there is a little elevation, ie slightly dryer underfoot, there’s casuarinas, and some eucalypts that looks vaguely jarrah-like, but a stunted, wide branching type.

Lots of small birds flit around the eyesight’s periphery, too quick to identify, although the last campsite, at the Frankland River, had a plague of Splendid wrens, alert and cheeky, overrunning the space alongside the tent. That previous Frankland River campsite had other, human, travellers, housed in a shiny motor home of the giant proportion, I guess difficult to manoeuvre in a supermarket carpark, best kept out of cities, and not able to leave the highway for fear of, well, everything really. Especially people like me. The occupants were self contained in their own little spaceship, the full ablutions aboard and failed to emerge.

Not even for that brightest of rainbows over the river as the sun was setting, or for that surreal, misty, memorable sunrise.

I’m self contained too, at least for a few days but I do extract myself from my bubble once in a while when the rain pauses, to see what sort of world I’m travelling through.

Self contained or not I want to move on tomorrow, Cosy Corner or bust, and Albany for the weekend. I do enjoy a modicum of socialisation now and again.

There’s limited opportunity to meet folks out here currently even if it’s only 15km away from the highway, there’s certainly not any crowd out here in the national park.

In any case I might be avoiding people. If someone wandered in on me today, extremely unlikely considering it’s raining, mid-wintery, and I pitched the tent last night on the side of a completely overgrown 4WD track, 500m from the little used, obscure trans-national park roadway, they just might wonder what on earth I’m doing out here.

The truth is somehow I just love it out here, at least for a few days.