The CrossingMoorine Rock to Southern Cross
Southern Cross Was A Rest Day, Sort Of
In HAA terms, a rest day meant walking into Southern Cross before I could stop. The Railway Tavern, a donated massage and dinner with the team made the place feel like a genuine pause.
Day 9 was a rest day, which meant we started by walking into town properly.
We had slept in Southern Cross, but my feet hadn’t reached town yet. The day began with about 17 kilometres along the pipeline to complete the arrival.
That was one of the odd mental games of HAA. A short day was still long enough to be a decent training walk for most people. But compared with the 50 kilometre days around it, this felt like being given a small mercy.
Kylie and Jayden came out for the final kilometre, which made the arrival feel less like an admin correction and more like a welcome. Jayden told me Southern Cross was like Radiator Springs, which is still a perfect seven-year-old review of a small road town.
The Railway Tavern became our base for the weekend. Jo donated rooms for all three of us. Kylie, who worked there, had helped make the connection. Jen was there too, from Bristol of all places, which amused the West Country part of me. Allison Hunter from Kalgoorlie-Boulder parkrun had put the word out.
HAA kept giving us proof that the support crew was bigger than the people in the van. There was the visible crew, Ben and Ols doing the daily work beside me, and then there was the HAA Control Centre, a Facebook chat I had set up while we were on the road. It became an invaluable extension of the in-vehicle crew: Kylie, Allison, Jo, Markus Forrest, local contacts, people who knew someone who knew someone. The country-wide support crew was not a neat org chart. It was people deciding to help.
Markus had somehow lined up a massage for me as well. Julie at Thai Remedial Massage Service donated her time, refused to take money, and then spent more than 90 minutes finding every angry knot in my feet and legs. It was amazing, effective, painful, and generous. I had not really thought about having knotted muscles in my feet until she gave me the crash course.
She worked on my feet, then sent me away with tips, advice, tiger balm, coconut oil lotion, a foot bath, and salts to use in it. Julie was Buddhist, and her generosity felt deeply tied to that outlook. She said what we were doing was wonderful, refused to take even a dollar, and said this was her way of donating and being part of HAA.
It is hard to overstate what that changed. My feet had been making me hobble around like a geriatric at the end of the days. Julie transformed them. When I stepped back out after Southern Cross, they no longer felt old and crippled. They felt renewed enough to keep going.
By evening we had team dinner, proper beds, hot showers, a replacement campervan, and a chance to breathe before the next stretch toward Yellowdine and Boorabbin.
In the morning, I would take those repaired feet back to the previous finish point and start east again.
Images From The Day
