The Crossing Southern Cross to Yellowdine

Rivendell Beyond The Flatlands

Day 10: Leaving Southern Cross, new fly nets, new feet, a Kalgoorlie 226 sign, the original van heading back to Perth, and the first stretch toward our version of Rivendell.

Date 25 May 2015

Journey day Day 10

Road sign showing Coolgardie 187 kilometres and Kalgoorlie 226 kilometres — That moment when Kalgoorlie was 226 kilometres away and I thought, I can walk that.

Southern Cross gave us beds, showers, a massage, a new van, and fly nets.

That last part mattered more than it sounds. The flies had become a real part of the walking by now, especially for Ben, whose relationship with them was not improving. The fly nets made a huge difference and ended up being one of the best purchases we made on the road. We left town with proper protection, a little more experience, and in my case, feet that felt almost new after Julie’s work the day before.

The sign out of town said Coolgardie 187 and Kalgoorlie 226. I remember looking at that number and thinking, oddly calmly, that I could walk it.

That was not because 226 kilometres had become small. It had not. It was because my sense of scale had already started shifting. A distance that would once have sounded ridiculous had become four or five working days. Hard working days, but still days.

The Lord of the Rings thread was in full swing by then. The Railway Tavern was our Prancing Pony. Kalgoorlie was Rivendell. I am not sure how much Ben and Ols were carrying that particular joke with me, but it amused me. As an avid Tolkien fan, it felt like a good fit for the scale of what we were doing. A big ridiculous story can help you carry a big ridiculous thing, especially when the actual thing is warm, dusty, sore, repetitive, and full of flies.

The upcoming Kalgoorlie-Boulder parkrun gave us another little bit of nonsense to play with. All three HAAmigos were meant to run it that Saturday, and for Ben and Ols it would be their first parkrun. So I turned it into a tiny fundraising hook: make a donation, guess our combined time, and the closest first guess would win a bottle of wine.

“Your job is to predict the TOTAL time of all three of our times added together. Closest guess received first wins a bottle of wine.”

The form guide was not exactly elite sport. Ben and Ols had just packed in smoking and were not runners, although they did have youth on their side. I had been around the 30 to 35 minute mark recently, but by Saturday I would have something like 600 kilometres of walking in my legs. It was not some grand fundraising strategy. It was a fun social hook, a way of turning the next parkrunday into something people could join from wherever they were.

If memory serves, the prize may have been the bottle of wine Apollo gave us when we picked up the campervan. That feels very HAA: a small beginning-of-trip gift becoming bait for a parkrun guessing game before we had even reached Kalgoorlie.

The old campervan made one final cameo, heading back to Perth on a tow truck. Not a happy camper. We had a replacement now, the plan was still alive, and the problem had become another story instead of the thing that stopped us.

That mattered. The vehicle problem had been large enough to threaten the rhythm of the whole trip, but it had not stopped the walking. Ben and Ols had dealt with the hire-company mess, the contents had been moved, and the replacement van had become home. The first big support-system challenge had turned into a solved problem.

The day itself had a reset feeling to it. We had left Southern Cross with a little more knowledge than we had arrived with: how catch-up kilometres worked, how much the body appreciated proper treatment, how local help could appear before we even knew exactly what we needed, and how quickly a small town could become part of the story.

By mid-afternoon Yellowdine Roadhouse was our coffee stop at around 32 kilometres, and then our camp for the night. There was something wonderfully HAA about that too. A place could be a target, a coffee stop, a camp, a photo, and a little psychological marker all at once.

It had been warm and heavy going, but another 50-ish kilometre day was still on the cards. The body was adapting, the team had survived its first vehicle crisis, and Kalgoorlie had changed from a faraway word into a place on a sign that I could imagine reaching.

Day 10 was the first day after a proper reset. Not easy, not tidy, but steadier than we had any right to expect.