It’s school holidays and before you know it, they’ll be over, so this time, we resolved that I’d take a couple weeks off work and get out of town. Mrs Jerry and I had planned to drive over to Adelaide to see our eldest son Jerry junior and his lovely wife. It’s pretty much a full days drive if you don’t drive like a madman, but you really do want to take a few breaks along the way and of course, share the driving if possible. I’m not a good passenger (now, there’s an accurate life admission, if ever I made one…) and so I’d rather be in the driving seat than elsewhere.
It’s going to be a doubly interesting drive because circumstances have conspired against two little boys (4 & 8), both brothers, whom we have been individually providing respite care for. As a result of both full time foster families suddenly being unable to look after their charges for different reasons, they have been in our full time care for a few months now. Our youngest son, Jerry minor, had decided to take this drive over with us because he misses his brother and new ‘sister’ but he has also selflessly ‘volunteered’ – i.e. paid for his passage, by agreeing to wrangle the youngsters when needed. Just as well, because its been a few years since I have had to travel with little ones and I am a bit out of practice. Mrs Jerry, as a teacher, does it all the time of course and I am full of admiration, but she does takes delight in my fumbling attempts at (almost) middle aged* parenting. Our wonderful eldest foster daughter doesn’t live at home now, but is 26 and thankfully no longer wriggles out of her seat belt but she’d have been a real help on this road trip. Her equally wonderful younger sister, (now 19) was however, a bugger for quietly undoing her seat belt and rotating around the car to make herself more comfortable, popping up in different places as it suited her. Sadly, she’s also otherwise engaged.
*I have used the (almost) middle aged line before and its not that I’m not middle aged, I’m actually 54 (or 8.71 in Jerry’s years) it’s just that when you’re convinced that you’ll live to 120, 60 is middle aged. Fair enough?
As a result of the new additions to our family and despite my suggestions that we could just tie them to the roof rack on our little car (they thought that sounded like fun…), Mrs Jerry decided to get a bigger vehicle and consequently our formerly pared down family and luggage requirements had again expanded to fill an entire 7 seat 4WD. The youngest two have a bit of a complicated history and as a result of being brothers and not having lived together for quite a while, they can often trigger each other into some fairly impressive rages and the red faced dervish that Jack Jack of the ‘incredibles’ movie becomes when he’s annoyed, comes to mind with the youngest. The older brother tends to roll his eyes a bit at the other and tries to ignore him, but after being severely poked and teased over a period of time will eventually lash out, scrapping, throwing toys and yelling etc. I don’t want to paint them too badly because we love them and as individuals they are quite lovely and lots of fun to be with, but together, they sometimes require an exorcist rather than a carer and it’s about the time that they are crawling around the ceiling like spiders that I usually find I have to go away for a couple of weeks on a business trip…
Not being able to create a plausible excuse to abscond on business this time, I committed to the trip, loading an impressive amount of crap into the new car and the boys, being transferred quickly from bed to seat, settled down fairly well. It was really quite early in the day and they were still dozing as we exited the little village we call home. Of course, by the time the sound of our big dogs barking died away, they’d already had a sly dig at each other and harsh words had been exchanged. Jerry minor, who is almost 15, slid across and started to talk softly to smallest boy and thankfully, he soon quietened.
En route to Adelaide, there’s a small circular salt lake located just off the western highway near the town of Dimboolah that we usually make a point of stopping at as it breaks the journey, has a relatively decent loo and is quite spectacular, being bright pink in colour. Unsurprisingly, it’s called ‘pink lake’ but this time, due to an overcast sky and a lot of seasonal rain, it wasn’t its usual bright colour and the youngsters were rather non plussed.
Jerry minor performed a few spectacular backflips for the camera (him being a sucker for instagram ‘likes’), which entertained us for a few moments and then as it looked like more rain, we started back up the hill to the car. Smallest boy was not impressed that we were leaving so soon and immediately threw himself to the ground and started working himself up into a frenzy. I, not altogether sympathetically, started to giggle and reached for the camera. The others, sensing an epic hissy fit in the making, ran away, leaving me to try and placate the little fellow. He pummelled the ground, threw handfuls of sand at me and yelled unintelligible small boy insults until I hugged him, stroked his hair (and at the same time finding I’d actually really missed looking after small kids) and then took his hand while we jalked up the hill. As confirmation that it was going to rain, it actually started and I was able to explain that we were just trying to stay dry and not cheat him out of time at the not so pink lake. Major meltdown avoided.
Many people have observed that there’s nothing quite like it when a small child trustingly reaches up and takes your hand. It is at the same time the most wonderful feeling but also an awesome responsibility. I had one of those moments walking up a small hill in the spitting rain under an overcast sky that day. It had been quite a few years.
We eventually reached our well appointed rented beach house on the outskirts of Adelaide and started to spread out and create a mess. Jerry minor slipped away to his room and into the world of social media and the little kids noticed that there was a full toy box and a shelf full of puzzles so they diligently began to build blocks. Thinking that they would be kept busy for a least a few moments, I snuck upstairs to pour a healthy sized G&T. Leaving them alone was big mistake as it happened, as the parting question from the eldest scamp was to ask if he could do a jigsaw puzzle and in saying yes, I fell for it. One thing I have learned, but had obviously forgotten, is that kids will approach you when you are massively tired or distracted and will cunningly ask a leading question that you might be tempted not to answer as diligently as you should, or to react as quickly as you would if they had your full attention. By the time I got back downstairs there was a small mountain of jigsaw pieces in the middle of the floor and half a dozen empty boxes that had once contained some quite challenging and distinctly seperate, 3 dimensional puzzles. Oops.
The trip overall was actually a great success, with the smallest boys being taught by the older two to skim stones into the sea and they had great fun chasing Jerry juniors equally small Dachshunds around the beach and in and out of the shallows.
We had a great trip to the zoo, which everyone loved and we aren’t keen on zoos, especially when they are done badly. I found my close second favourite animal after the Koala and saw the Goodfellows tree Kangaroos. They really look like stuffed toys and having breakfast to distract them, this one was too engrossed in his grub to worry about me gawking at him. We have two species of tree roo in Australia and Makali here isn’t one of them. He actually comes from New Guinea.
The big draw for the kids (and my Mum) at Adelaide zoo were the Pandas, of course and their enclosure was far and away better than the sad dusty looking area that I had seen in Beijing – and that zoo, sadly I would not recommend.
Partially because he’s a great son and partially because he had taken up a lot of slack on the Adelaide trip, I took Jerry minor on a long promised ski trip the week after. The two of us loaded up the new ‘tank like’ 4WD and set out east to the nearest snowfields. They are around 5 hours away and it’s really not a terrible drive at all, but concentrating hard on not breaking the speed limit and in the process, collecting a huge amount of fines along the speed camera infested Hume highway, really takes it out of you and given that Jerry minor quickly slipped into a teenage coma next to me, I had to stop often in order to stay alert. Just because we don’t actually have enough mouths to feed (two adults, four kids – at home, three dogs, two cats and six hens), I was also looking out for roadkill – or more specifically, kangaroos and wombats that had been hit by cars, but still had living joeys in the pouch. Not for food you understand, but to try and save them. We’d reared orphaned native animals in a previous life when running a wildlife sanctuary in north Queensland and I quite liked the idea of giving the youngsters the experience of being responsible for something, so I brought along my animal first aid kit and scanned the roadsides for sad lumps of fur.
The temperature started to drop as we headed up into the Alpine areas, but there was scant sign of snow yet. We had to pick up skis and snow chains at the small town of Bright but I wasn’t too excited at the reports of little natural snow and I hoped that there’d be enough man made stuff to keep us happy.
We made it up the Alpine highway to an elevation of 1, 861 metres to the resort at Mount Hotham. Trying hard not to wheeze too obviously in the thin air (me only), we got the keys and checked into our small cabin. It was too late in the day to get a run in but we went out into the resort on foot and bonded over dinner.
That night it snowed and the next morning, we excitedly took the bus down to the beginner slopes and clipped into our skis. Jerry minor had skied before, but several years before and I was interested to see what he remembered. I was a bit nervous, having had my worn and knackered hip joints swapped out for the latest titanium and ceramic versions only months before; but as it happened, we were both evenly matched on our first run and luckily nothing exploded within me. Having convinced myself that I was due for a catastrophic ‘Yeti’ as we used to call spectacular crashes on skis, I had purchased a helmet and not having tried it on in the shop, discovered that it was rather like having a large black space hopper on my head. It was just about as streamlined and as such, it probably slowed me down to a speed that any crash would have been telly tubby, rather than Schumacher like.
I offered up some of my old no nonsense military ski instructional techniques that seemed to work and pretty soon, he was flying down the runs with me chasing and filming him. Back in the Marines, it was a case of ‘you might not have skied before, but in two days you’ll have your house on your back, so learn quickly’ and Jerry minor responded to that well. I am not so overconfident to think that I could get Mrs Jerry out on skis as she much prefers the spa’s over whizzing down the piste, but she has, in the distant past, ventured out on the cross country skis with me and then sadly vowed never to do so again.
We had dinner that evening in the general store, which doubles as a pub and over a great mushroom linguini and burgers we gawked at the outrageous helicopter skiing videos that were clearly not set in our hilly, rather than mountainous, Australian Alps. After dinner, we waited for the bus back up the hill and smiled at the off duty resort staff, who on their night out, had built a ski jump on the small slope outside the bar and were busy crashing through a pile of plastic crates in a sledge. I remembered doing something similar during my season in the NSW ski fields on a working holiday 30 plus years before, but I think I may have been naked with the crates having been stuffed with paper and set on fire. How the hell I have lived this long is beyond me.
The second night brought a huge low pressure area through the mountains and a 7cm dump of fresh snow fell on top of the man made base. Whilst it was a bit icy and visibility wasn’t great , we loved it and we pretty much made the first and last lifts of the day up the mountain. I tried feebly to dissuade Jerry minor from the impression that as a right of passage, he should dive naked into a snow drift and roll around outside the chalet and leaving no doubt as to his parentage and thus inherited poor judgement; he ignored me – but thankfully, insisting on wearing his jocks, a woolly hat and gloves, he tore out into the snow, rolling around as I filmed him.
He was back inside within a couple of minutes and rapidly turning red as I checked the footage and realised that not being a millennial, I had completely cocked up my only task. Without a word of complaint, he was back outside again in an instant, hamming it up for whatever social media site he was planning to post it on. It was very windy that night and the visibility closed right down, but we had fun just being together and the apres ski stories he told made me think that being a teenager hadn’t changed all that much from my day. Overnight, the now howling gale brought more snow, suggesting a great morning on the slopes.
Given that it was our last day, I planned to get up early and dig the car out of whatever snow drift it was sitting in so that we could load her up and get a couple of runs in before we had to drive back. Upon reaching the car I saw that there thankfully wasn’t too much snow blocking the car in, but there was a huge mound on top of it. Congratulating myself on having purchased a diesel and having filled it up with Alpine fuel, which allegedly wouldn’t freeze above minus 7 degrees, I was rather shocked to discover that the car wouldn’t start.
I gave Betty (because she’s black) a few moments to consider her sins and worked on freeing the rear wheels of snow and fitting the chains. I tried a few more times to get her started, which she bravely did before dying and then I rang the breakdown service. In the hour it took them to arrive, I helped dig a couple of other cars out of the snow and cleared most of the ice off my windows. It didn’t take the mechanic long to diagnose frozen diesel and commenting that it had been a really cold night, he used his compressor to blow the plug of iced fuel in the pipes back into the tank and start her up. We chatted about skiing, living in the mountains and his clever move to buy a couple of rental properties nearby whilst the resort was being built as the car warmed up. Sadly, by the time I made it back to the accomodation, it was time to check out and leave so that we could get home before dark. The roads back through the national park were by now snow covered and full of drivers who clearly had never been on the white stuff before. The newbies annoyingly crawled along at 15kmh for ages before we could safely pass them, but I breathed deeply and remained calm. It was a long and uneventful drive back with no Joeys found, but we had fun telling lots of stories that probably shouldn’t be heard by his Mum.
I’m now back in a remote corner of north western India and I am once again, lamenting the fact that it’s the dry and vegetarian state of Gujarat. Still, it gets dark soon and I can have an early night. I need one after all the driving with kids and flying without them that I have done over the last three weeks. Happy days.
