This evening, we hope that our entire team have arrived safely in Gunnedah and are billeted out to the appropriate people. Mich and I left Newtown bright and bushy-tailed at 10:30am thinking that we would be one of the first cars to arrive at the planned time of 6pm. Little could we foresee the long and mostly straight yet metaphorically windy road ahead. After a few unplanned detours which our GPS kindly re-routed us from, we hit Cessnock at 1:30pm. Still tracking. Not many places open but we ordered a burger at the local, sat and talked and ate. Suddenly, Mich looks at her phone and says, “Erin, it’s 3 o’clock!” and I almost fell off my bar stool in shock! I mean, we had been talking all morning, it’s not like we ignored each other the entire drive and had our whole lives to catch up on over lunch or anything… So we rushed back to the car, determined to make up for lost time. Two minutes later, we may have had to make an emergency run into a winery. But we were still determined to make it on time! So we drove. And drove. And the road just kept going! It was never ending. But when we had almost reached the end, I realized I had missed calls and texts from Laura, who was worried for our safety and it was now 6:30pm and we had definitely not been one of the first cars to arrive. I called her back, apologizing for giving her a heart attack and got directions into the Anglican church. When we pulled in, we saw Joel and Colin Bale standing with some local reps who kindly gave us a map and directed us to our billet. Who is a labrador breeder! Excitement! And handy to find her house as we were just told to go to the end of this street (can you even call a dirt road a street?) and identified her not by house number, but by the amount of dogs trying to get over the fence and get a pat. Also the horse was a bit nice. So we made it safely! Through the wild, um, outback of outside Sydney?! Had a good dinner, planning on having a good sleep and we hope to be able to meet up with the team tomorrow and report back on more than our personal experience for those of you who are thinking, “Who are these weirdos and why can’t they read either a road-map or the time?”
Erin and Mich
P.S We also failed at uploading pics of our journey – sorry! We’ll try and figure out the MB thingy tomorrow hopefully
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