Day 188 | Rest day 3 in Darwin: plenty of scurrying around and heart palpitations

rest day 3

I avoid being a loser most of the time: there’s too much at stake and I don’t possess much that is not essential.

Today is a story of a period of time of heart palpitations but a happy ending.

To avoid having to remove all the loose items from my backpack and then get all hot and sweaty from carrying it on my back I left the backpack behind today. Instead I shoved everything into the many pockets of my long pants: camera, wallet and sunnies. Having become paranoid about getting sucked into a roadtrain’s vortex I bought a mirror today that fits neatly on the sunnies and will be great once I get used to it and also work out how to store it safely.

I biked off and some 10km later when I got to a shopping centre I realised that my glasses, yes, get that, my normal glasses, were no longer with me. I only had my sunnies to find myself the rest of the way around Australia. Arrrgggh!

Still I thought I’d nick in and get what I was after, some new music and go and find them after that. Well, it was a huge shopping centre and the nicking in took considerably longer than I anticipated. Try moving around inside a packed, darkened, shopping centre at Sunday lunchtime in sunnies just for something to do. (Oh, actually there were plenty like me in there.) Once out I prepared to ride back to the bike shop, the most likely drop point.

Low and behold they were still sitting in their groovy egg case about 50m from where I parked the bike, laying smack in the middle of the footpath. Lucky no one in Darwin walks anywhere, particularly at lunchtime. Hooray! (So I could go back inside and find something to eat.)

But I do have a good record of finding lost things: my beanie at Top Humbert camp site in the Gregory National Park when I dropped it crossing a river, and the very occasional other bits and pieces. Actually the only things lost during the six months has been the original skullcap beanie in Victoria somewhere, replaced in Adelaide, and a T shirt, my favourite, nicked off the washing line in Melrose. And most of the broken things have been due to me thrashing the poor old bike. Not a bad record.

Before I finish this I had better mention that I have misplaced some things: the parcel that I posted to myself in Katherine wasn’t there when I turned up. It’s got my good shirt, sandshoes, a spare tyre and other not-needed-at-this-stage things. It had been there but was sent back to Alice when I failed to arrive within the statutory month. I’d like to say that I did notify them prior to the end of the month and they agreed to keep it for another month but instead they had efficiently returned it.

Now it could be anywhere.

I haven’t given up hope for being reunited: a parcel sent from one post office to another can’t just disappear and they must have state of the art quality assurance systems in place.

Fingers crossed.