Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, October 9, 2002


NON-STOP JOURNEY SLOWING DOWN


STILL on tour and wall-eyed from long hours on the road, I have even taken to snoozing at rest stops, which comes as a surprise. We had a family rule on the Adelaide-Melbourne cannonball run: On the way there, you filled up at the Shell station at Tailem Bend, and then got back on the rail non-stop all the way to Melbourne. On the way back, the fill-up was at Beaufort and that was it. We rocketed past the asteroid clusters of petrol stops and motels strung across the countryside. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you should have gone before and bad luck. I once blew a tyre at Fiery Creek, near Ararat, and a female passenger in the back took advantage of the situation to dash frantically into the bush and was not seen again for some time. Her lucky break. The kids learned. My son says he cannot get into a car now without feeling a sharp pain in his bladder. And my daughter admits that she, too, has become a non-stopper on long journeys, given to chiding her partner whenever he wants to pull over to take photos: ``But we've just passed that truck!'' echoing my own sentiments. She has gone from an ``Are we there yet?'' child, to: ``We could be there by now!'' The difference now for me, I suppose, is the current journey has largely been an aimless wander - South Australia, Victoria, NSW, wherever - with no real deadline. At my age, I also need more nanna naps. At day's end, I even look forward to the cheap motel with no hot water, leaking taps and rooms that smell like the disinfectant toilet lollies in a men's urinal, and could easily be mistaken for one by the tiles on the wall. The deodoriser is supposed to mask the stench of stale cigarette smoke so the room can be passed off as ``non smoking''. Except no amount of perfumed cover-up can kill the smell of a smoke-seeped pillow. Speaking of smoking, here is an aside from this trip: I was sitting in the foyer of the Sheraton in the Park, in Sydney - no, not staying there, just waiting for someone - and even though there were plenty of other empty sofas around, four Japanese men sat next to me and all lit up cigarettes, duty free no doubt. I felt ill and had to move away. Hard to believe I was a smoker until - what is it now? - five years ago. But I like cheap motels, the seedier the better, so long as they are reasonably clean. My affection for them is partly a romantic notion arising from old private eye movies - the blinking neon sign and the blonde floozy with the Saturday night special - and, oddly, Hunter S. Thompson, the American writer. Back when he was covering US politics for The Rolling Stone magazine in the '70s, he was congenitally unable to meet a deadline. He would be locked away in a remote motel to write, along with a typewriter, a quart of bourbon, several bottles of vodka, grapefruit and a selection of drugs. So Thompson said. The doubts that someone off his face, as he claimed always to be, could manage to write anything that made sense never spoiled the effect of his motel imagery in my mind. I am now in the $45 a night Shamrock Motel, at Balranald, and the drought hereabouts is bad.