Soar like an eagle trying to find a perch anywhere long this route and failing miserably.
This blog is in need of some serious TLC. One post for 4 weeks in Sydney?! Puh-leeze... If you've been waiting for a catch-up post though, this sadly isn't it. Because we just arrived in Perth after a loooong time on a train and there's no way I won't try to bore you all to death with pictures of landscapes. Because boy did we see a lot of land.
We were supposed to get off the train for three different excursions but thanks to a rather large bushfire in New South Wales we were already delayed over 7 hours on our first evening. From that point on they were simply trying to catch up to make it to Perth on time since the train has to be ready for departure again the next day. But all kinds of stuff kept happening so that the only outings we had from the train were two refueling stops of about 15 minutes each where we were allowed to get off and wander around the platform a bit. (Or in the case of Cook, an abandoned railway town with a current population of 4, tumbleweed littered dirt roads.)
The adults had free alcohol to take the edge off and the kids, well, they made the best of it. The lounge became their jungle gym and we made them walk back to our compartment - two wagons away - for every little thing.
So let's look at Australia going by!
Big excitement before we set off from Sydney.Bye bye Sydney!Yep, we slept here for three nights.Dinner and a show.39C at Broken Hill. But goddamit we were getting off that train to get our 15 minutes of walking around the platform, even if it drenched us in sweat and flies.Seeking some shade and a photo-op.This is the town where they filmed "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" Unfortunately this is as much of the place as we got to see.Big train mural outside the Broken Hill station.I was hoping there'd be more kangaroos but we only saw a handful. They probably know not to get near that giant metal beast chugging through their landscape...A rain shower going down.There was a bit of this, obviously, but not as much as you might think. (WHY NOT FOR GOD'S SAKE!?!??) Unfortunately our children are "blessed" with very short attention spans when it comes to movies. But I have high hopes that we can train them for the future.Now BabyPaw will perform a daring half-flip over the side before dismounting with a scream and a backwards salto.Love that one dark blue cloud in the middle. Yep, that's the kind of stuff you start to get excited about after 48 hours on a train.That's only one half of the train.You've never seen a kid so happy as this one when he got to play with rocks, sticks and grass for 15 minutes.That name Nullarbor Plain doesn't come from nothing. No tree anywhere in sight for thousands of kilometers. We still managed to hit 4 cows with our train though.BabyPaw learned to use a fork finally. Still working on some specifics but we're getting there...HILLS!!!Starting to get the hang of iPad games. Still nowhere near his sister's proficiency at this age but we can't all be geniuses, right?!And still no trees...Every single time I looked down our corridor I expected a woman with a dragon-embroidered dressing gown to walk around the corner. If you don't get that, go watch "Murder on the Orient Express" right now. You're welcome.Nope, no trees here either.A lovely old lady on the train knitted us some beanies. How cool is that?! She just whipped them out like it's nothing. Incidentally, knitting is probably the perfect occupation for a trip like this.And then suddenly we woke up on the fourth day to trees! And grass!A veritable feast for the eyes.Mind you, sunset was pretty spectacular. Trees or no trees.
So there you have it. A trip along Australia's bottom half. Unfortunately no pictures of Adelaide since our stop-over there happened in the middle of the night due to the aforementioned bush fire. Luckily we finagled our way out of having to get up thanks to the kids. The rest of our poor travel companions weren't so lucky and had to spend over three hours inside Adelaide station eating nibbles and waiting for the train to be serviced. Yay for little children!
