Camping, Optimism, Experience Etc Etc Part 2

The next day dawned grey and cool with a promise of rain.  It is a measure of the previous days heat that this actually seemed delightful.  Morning also saw the arrival of the final member of our little crew.  Tony works for one of those large financial institutions that you tend to only hear about when they accidentally sodomise the world's economy to death or are slapped over the wrist by a regulator for facilitating the last twenty years of terrorist financing.  Suffice it to say if his employer was a human being it would be locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.  It is also quite demanding on its employees which is why Tony flew from Perth to Sydney the previous night so that he could drive to Glenworth Valley on Saturday morning.

We greeted him with scorn.  The reason is simple.  We had asked him to "bring a couple of bottle of wine".  Now you or I on being given that instruction would know to load the car up with as much alcohol as humanely possible and then fill the baby bottles with mouthwash.  Tony brought precisely two bottles of wine.  This was barely enough to persuade the children to go to bed at a reasonable hour (four o'clock in the afternoon) and certainly not enough to keep five adults from murdering each other around the camp fire.  Still in the traditional human way we dealt with this problem by ignoring it until it was almost too late and blaming the person who had after all followed his instructions to the letter.

With Tony now attached we made our way to the horse pestering area where Natali and Idette were engaged in standing next to a stationary horse on which sat one of the children.  The horse was a special one chosen particularly to be ridden by humans that only came up to its knee and had never been on a horse before.  That is not only did it not rear, toss or gallop it didn't move much at all without a great deal of persuasion.  On the occasions that it did move it seemed to move only so that we could heave a sigh of exasperation when it stopped moving again after three steps.  This is called "having fun with the children".  I suspect the horse was having fun with the adults.

Having given the children a brief introduction to the equestrian lifestyle we wandered up to the combined, reception, cafe, souvenir stand, horse centre to grab a snack.  It was at this point that I realised I had actually been to Glenworth Valley before.  Specifically I had come horse riding here some years ago back when I had a life. Yes, believe it or not I too know what it is like to have a large muscular beast between my thighs, our sweat mingling together as we strain silently towards a mutually satisfactory conclusion.  I'm sorry, I seem to have lost track a little, all I meant to say was that despite the fact that my "experimental years" are behind me I thoroughly understand why Natali and Idette wanted to go horse riding.

Essentially they wanted to go horse riding because it meant that Jason, Tony and myself would have to look after the children for a couple of hours.  This we agreed to do.  In the event it wasn't too difficult.  Tony went to sleep (jetlag was his excuse) and Jason stared innocently into the middle distance so I took the children off to play.  Entertaining the children turned out to be reasonably easy,  basically I stood back and let them entertain themselves.  There was a dust covered little hummock that they took great delight in climbing to the top of and then either jumping off or sliding down.  My supervision was limited to pointing out the large jagged rock at the bottom and advising that they do their best to avoid it.  This they successfully did.  I returned with as many children as I set out with which is the principal requirement and so covered in dust that Jason took them down to the creek for his share of the childminding.  When they returned the dust had been skilfully replaced with mud.  In my defence I would point out that Jason is an actual parent whereas I was making it up as I went along (dust; rookie mistake, it brushes straight off).

The rest of the afternoon passed with little but the clap of unsuccessful attempts to kill flies to break the silence.  I managed to finish most of the biography of Augustus I brought with me while Jason failed to drown the children in the creek.  Finally, after dinner came the moment we had been dreading.  How were we going to share two bottles of wine between five people.  At this point the neighbouring campers came to our aid.  They pointed out that there was a bottle shop no more than fifteen minutes drive, well twenty minutes drive or half an hour max, from our current location.  I don't drive, Jason, Tony and Natali had enjoyed such wine as we possessed.  All eyes turned to Idette.  Nobly she rose to the challenge.  She and Natali would fetch wine she proclaimed if we would clean the children's teeth and get them ready for bed.  By this stage we would have agreed to surgically extract their teeth and polish them individually then put the kids into a medically induced coma if somebody was going to deliver wine at the end of it.

At some point we had fetched wood and Tony made an awesome fire but he got little credit because we still hadn't forgiven him for screwing up the wine situation so badly in the first place.  We lit it rather early which meant that by the time it got dark we were discussing whether we should fetch more wood.  Unfortunately it was dark but the fire survived longer than us.  We sat around the fire, drank wine, some of us smoked cigars (Tony & me) and we talked about the sort of things that friends can talk about when they're sober but they feel slightly awkward about doing so.  After which we went to bed.  I have it on the authority of everyone else that I snored.