At last. The hustle of the last few days is over. Everything is packed that will be packed. The heavy luggage - a 25kg suitcase carrying everything I'll need for cooking, cleaning, accommodation, sleeping and wearing for the next month as I travel from possible snow in Ireland to the deserts of Dubai - has been labelled and conveyor-belted away, hopefully to the right plane, and there's nothing to do now except sit and charge things and wait.
This new journey began under a blue moon, late on Saturday night. It looked for a while as though it wasn't going to begin then. After a few hours of packing, wrestling gear up and down the apparently infinite steps of our hillside home on an unusually hot autumn evening, I found myself sprawled like a lizard on top of my suitcase, vainly trying to persuade the zip to close, and on the verge of taking a friend's advice that all I really needed to pack was my passport and bank card. However, after a few minutes of The Ten Commandments (appreciate free-to-air TV screening religious classics around Easter time, even if this one wasn't from quite the right era ... or Testament), I returned to the fray, and after jettisoning yet another item I'd previously deemed indispensable, the zip was closed and the bag loaded and I was away. It was 9pm and what a night it was for a drive - a drive under a rare moon, so bright and full that almost every detail of the landscape could be seen, rendered breathlessly beautiful.
I reached Sydney at midnight, just in time for Easter Sunday.
Now I sit here and charge things and wait - and watch bags of McDonald's being hauled about by yet another a conveyor belt (conveyor-belt-y places, airports), from a kitchen upstairs to a serving area downstairs. Weird what you notice when you don't have anything much else to do.
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| Lithgow NSW, 10pm. |