The Basics are in South Australia. Follow the tour as Kris from The Basics checks in with his blog at Undercover.
Tim and I are watching Iron Chef in an underground motel in Coober Pedy, SA. It’s a fairly odd way to finish a day of driving in the outback. We started out of Adelaide pretty early this morning, wishing we’d brought one of the many road atlases we’ve picked up on previous tours...each time we forget one and end up with an extra map for the collection.After pfaffing around in Adelaide for almost an hour we finally make it onto the A1 and start heading north, the terrain becoming progressively dryer and sparser. A short stop in Snowtown (famous for its Soldier’s Memorial and serial killers of course) is followed by long stretches of dead-straight road.
We’re entertained briefly by flexible rubber reflector poles that truly seem to dance in the heavy crosswinds. A bit of an American Beauty plastic bag moment I suppose, and I want to try and capture it on camera but the floppy plastic reflectors finish up just as I fish my camera out of my bag.
It’s difficult driving- we’re being pushed by blasts of wind onto the other side of the road with alarming regularity. Every truck that looms in the distance needs to be carefully avoided, hugging the emergency lane.
It’s the first long day that all three of us are in the van (I flew into Adelaide this morning, having stayed back in Melbourne the previous night to attend my 10-year high school reunion). The progression of events is inevitable, and it’s been repeated any number of times on previous trips- there’s music, then silence, then an argument, then a strange mixture of apologies, resignation to different points of view, more silence, and finally laughter and general conversational bulltwang.
Our credit card maxes out in the late afternoon. We really need to work out where the money for all the mixes and video clips we’ve done recently is coming from, but more urgently we need to be able to pay for petrol and food for the next two months. This van is chewing through petrol. Maybe we need to drive closer to 100km per hour instead of 140, and maybe the air con is a luxury we can’t afford. We’ll see I guess. Check in again in a few weeks.
For the moment, Iron Chef is an amusing and financially non-burdensome pastime.
Kris, The Basics October 25, 2008
