Day 23 | more not much in Southend: what else can you do?
It’s the characters who make this trip as much as the scenery.
A couple of real characters popped up here.
One a recently retired meteorologist who was forced to retire before his 55th birthday due to some crazy Commonwealth government regulation or his $50k superannuation would be halved. He had tales from his days stationed in Ceduna where he met a woman roller blading from Perth to Sydney self supported which meant she pushed some sort of trolley. She apparently made it.
And another guy ‘walking for world peace’ who got his water in the Outback by holding out his water bottle when a Winnebago or caravan went past and managed to get from place to place rather too quickly for a walker. The underemployed Ceduna police checked him out and found that not only he didn’t have a visa but he was wanted on various fraud charges.
‘Jacko’ is another local who would have an interesting life if even a quarter of what he claimed was true.
Entertaining with the story of trying to get a credit card limit increase to $10k from $6k the bank manager refused him despite having a $460k term deposit and a few other accounts with money in them. When the term deposit was up he asked for the money in $50 notes which he then withdrew and took to his safety deposit box at another bank, just waiting for another investment opportunity.
Jacko had a dozen stories like that of stock market insider information from people passing through and fortunes made.
Or buying the caravan park for $100k from an old woman and then being offered $600k immediately by someone else.
Jacko said $1m and when that figure was being seriously considered raised the asking price to $2m.