Warrakurna Roadhouse: Yeah, time for another shower

36 km | zzOz total: 6,540 km

How much more difficult can this road become? Well, try the first 2 hours of the day at less than 9 km/hour.

I know I sound like I’m boasting, ie, I’m conquering some extreme task, but then I realise it’s just a bicycle trip along a road.

I was severely challenged in the boasting stakes by someone I met today.

Bob is one of the most successful people I’ve ever met, everything he touches turns to gold.

It was hard to follow the flow of his jumbled life history, you get a lot of that out on the road, both the stories and the incoherence, but somewhere he had started a car detailing business and built it into a 20-person operation. Then, or was it before, he managed someone else’s business of the same kind, except it might have had window tinting involved, it was hard to make it out. They had bought it for $20k and then sold it to a chef from the eastern states for $200k. After a while, the team was doing burnouts in the police cars in for repair, ramming others into posts, he decided as the manager that 48 of the 52 staff had to go. From that point on, the business really went through the roof, and the chef sold out a couple of years later for $1.2m, or was it $2.2m?

His life was just one piece of brilliance after another.

Casino? From $20, he went to $17k. Why stop there, I thought? Another time, he would go to $40k.

The stories just flowed for an hour or so, some being quite hilarious but perhaps not intentionally so.

I do enjoy this scenario, I’m a bit evil in encouraging people to try to outdo their previous outrageous remark, but he’d started with his best material and finally ran out of steam after describing his marvellous desert garden created at his home in Jameson, an Aboriginal settlement where he is now a disability support worker.

He seems happy enough for all the nonsense spouted. He is a cheery soul, and I like that.

I think I’m grounded in reality and tell it as I see it, with few embellishments for effect.

My reality is that I’m propped up in my tent, and somehow, plenty of ants have found their way in, so I’m swatting a few of the aniseed-smelling crawlers as I write the day’s events in my notebook.

I’m still grinning.