OUTBACK BINGO

• Get beeped at by a road train
• Sarah needs to get someone to take off an item of clothing
• Get 10 people to acknowledge us by waving or lifting a finger
• In a roadhouse one of has to ask one of the staff what they would do if they were stuck in a lift with some cheese, a baguette and an angry badger
• In a fuel stop we have to play tag whilst fuelling the car
• We have to make up a story of where we are from
• All day fashion of poll to see if we’re the only ones who haven’t heard what the irishman the night before was talking about!
• We have to ask someone how far it is to Vienna and make them believe that we think we’re in Austria

Above, the list of things Sarah and I arrive at for our road trip back to Perth from Esperance the next morning. We also include writing predictions for each other’s 2014 and counting road trains, roadhouses and how many times the radio plays Bruno Mars! A suggestion from a friend is that we play the first person to see a camel, aeroplane, emu and a black swan in order to make the other do something. We genuinely do not see any of these items at any point on our journey…!

We choose to go via the middle road back to Perth to find wave rock, a tourist attraction just eastwards of Perth on the way. I take the first turn, beginning the 726km to Perth. Not far to go eh?! The first excitement occurs at 10.15am when we are stopped by roadworks and are acknowledged by a man wearing his hair in plaits! Another man holding a stop sign genuinely then bows in gratitude at my acknowledgement of his services! We next reach Ravensthorpe and play the first round of fuel tag :-). Running around the car it is most fun and we don’t care if people think we’re stupid :-). Quite handily a road train pulls up to which I ask for a beep ;-). He kindly gets in on the banter and obliges :-). I snap George and Sarah with a traffic cone then we find a crazy scarecrow on a motorbike! We encounter a wave hello sign which of course needs waved at! The same road train passes us and we get another beep :-). Then get stuck behind it…! We drive past a truck hanging off a mound of sand! Spied by Sarah, I genuinely miss this and have to do a u turn to go back and take a picture! Not quite sure how it got there… Maybe placed just to make the drive more interesting! We play guess the colour of the next car but have to wait quite a while! Sarah is much better at this game than I am!

We reach Hyden, the home of wave rock and of course stop to take a picture of the ‘wave rock’ sign. We are just enjoying the banter when a car pulls up on the other side of the road… Instinct goes into overdrive with it on the ‘not good’ end of the scale… This man offers to take our picture… I can’t work out if he’s thinking of stealing the camera or the car… He wants us to hold hands as he argues everyone waves… We decide we’ll join the masses and wave! I extrapolate myself quickly and get in the car, shortly followed by Sarah… We reach Wave Rock and see him eating lunch. He had been driving the other way five minutes previously…! I guide Sarah the other way and then encounter mannequins and a lace exhibition…! Of course you find that in the outback… This room freakily reminds me of the changing heads scene in Return to Oz! It genuinely feels like the beginnings of a horror movie… I actually ask Sarah if we are in one?! Sitting eating lunch on a picnic bench she decides that you don’t usually see picnic scenes in horror movies so hopefully we should be safe…!

Our feet find the wave rock walking loop. We reach steps with a wear sensible shoes sign! After laughing at people yesterday in thongs, Sarah is in thongs! We walk the rock and I capture my feet. Sarah manages to fashion a cartwheel. We are led to an attraction called the hippo’s yawn a kilometre away from the wave. Walking through cobwebs, we know we’re the first people in the day to attempt this walking… We eventually get there and are a little underwhelmed. Fine to see because we’re there but I imagine disappointing on a day trip from Perth… Back in the car, we phone the actual George and leave him a voicemail to share the banter :-).

Caption the image…!

Safely leaving without encountering act two of the horror movie, on the drive back through Hyden, we find metal figurines. We turn one on a bike into George!! We then get to see Kulin because of a road train accident closing the main road. I hope all involved are ok. Sarah’s tablet providing musical entertainment, we rotate between R&B, hip hop and 1930s music. Phantom of the opera being blasted out in the outback makes me smile then Lady Gaga’s poker face plays next :-). All the banter :-). We stop in Brookton and get more fuel. I get ice cream and encourage Sarah to ask the girl behind the counter the badger story. We have to make it an echidna instead as she does not know what a badger is! This girl responds that she would climb out the top of the lift and doesn’t say anything about the bread or cheese. Asking another friend he tells me he would feed the baguette to the echidna so it would stay away from him and he hopes the cheese is a big enough block to stand on and climb out the top! Sarah tells me this is her favourite answer in years of asking this question! I am bemused by the amount of people rushing to get out of the lift. My own answer is that I would eat the bread and cheese and put up with the badger until someone rescues me :-). I’m just patient me :-). What would you do? And more importantly, what would George do? We reach the outskirts of the city just as the sun is fading. We end the road train count at 19.38. It ends on 67. It took us nine and a half hours to get ten waves! And yes we were waving first :-). We drop the car and find a McDonalds. We didn’t quite manage everything on our list but we had a lot of good fun trying! It was awesome fun :-). I can’t wait to exchange our predictions in December next year and see what actually happened :-).