SW Australia: One-Pot Poisoning

27 May 2011

Yallingup to Nannup

I have been poisoned by a one-pot goulash dinner.  At least I am convinced that is what kept me up all night.  Not the soothing sounds of the crashing surf outside the campervan or the sweet silence of the clear starry sky.  Those would have been better reasons for rising and making the pilgrimage out into the welcoming night with its tingling cold breeze.  Yes, better reasons indeed than the ones that sent me scuttling out of the van one, two, three, four, five times until dark had faded to light and I wished for a less painful death.

Not surprisingly, my nocturnal activities have put a damper on our daylight ones.  I yearn for sleep while Gina yearns for a 14 kilometer hike.  We compromise by parking the campervan at Canal Rocks, which bisects the Cape to Cape trail.  It is here that I can nap while she walks miles in either direction.  Only she didn’t walk miles in either direction, in fact I think she may have merely looped around a rock or two before walking directly back to the van, loudly complaining about the trail being “too bushy”, waking me not from a deep sleep – there wasn’t time for that – but from what had promised to be a deepening one.  This makes us both rather unhappy.

Nothing to do now but move forward, the road taking us through some idyllic wine country with Autumn leaves on the vine, the amiable hamlet of Margaret River, and onward to the outskirts of big tree country, where with dusk falling it was time to make camp in the sleepy village of Nannup.  There ain’t nothing going on in Nannup, and we mean nothing, except for the changing of the leaves with the season and from the sounds of it, a cocktail party of sorts in the caravan next door.

Over here in our campervan it’s now time for dinner.  There’s another one-pot goulash meal waiting in the cupboard.  Gina will be on her own with that one.