I soooo don’t want to talk about today. I’d much rather skip over it and pretend it never happened. But it did, and to maintain the flow of the narrative I suppose I will have to relate the details.
After experiencing pretty foul weather since Jindabyne, I’d convinced myself that things were going to improve, and even if they didn’t, I’d made fairly decent progress yesterday in the rain so I expected to cover another decent distance today, rain or no rain. It had rained very hard overnight and was still raining when I awoke at 8am. I spent a while reading emails waiting for the situation to improve and by 10 am it stopped raining so I set out again on the main Princes Highway. I passed by this interesting old cinema, and now wish I’d spent the day there instead:
Leaving Narooma I crossed the entrance to the Wagonga inlet:
But within half an hour the rain had started again, and it got heavier and heavier. I came across this obviously very recent fatal accident on the road:
A bit further on it started to rain so hard that I had to seek shelter. I was close to a turnoff from the highway leading to a rest area with some small wooden shelters. I got under one of these shelters intending to wait till the heavy rain stopped.
An hour later it was still raining very hard and a creek had formed alongside the main road as floodwaters drained; the depth of this water made entry and exit to and from the rest area impossible. Knowing I was going to be there a while I got a novel out of my pannier and started reading it, however shortly the rain got so bad that water was splashing all over the pages.
I waited and waited under this shelter, and after about 3 hours watching the flood getting worse and worse some kind people invited me into their campervan where it was much drier. We all waited several more hours until the rain intensity finally decreased around 6.30 pm. The flood retreated sufficiently to allow me to leave the carpark, and after 6 hours there I was very keen to escape. Back on the highway there was no other traffic in either direction for the first few km and I was worried that the road ahead was blocked; however then I saw another car coming from the other direction. After about 30 minutes I reached the next town, Bodalla - the only accommodation there was the Bodalla Arms Hotel - not the most comfortable place I’ve stayed in but at least it was dry inside. I got a few cans of beer at the bar, took them to my room, and tried to blot the whole day out of my memory.
Bodalla Arms HotelDistance covered today - a pathetic 20kms. Really depressing.
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