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Days Eight to Ten.

I had been dreaming about being chased by a large mosquito that kept going around my head getting louder and louder. Then I woke and the mosquito noise was a power boat doing laps of the lake.

I had drifted off in a deck chair on the grassy bank of a large lake. Now it was late morning and the sun was warm and there was a light breeze. The newspaper I had dropped had blown across the grass and one piece of broadsheet was actually in the lake. Now the boat was on the far side of the water, and trailing the boat was a large round inflatable dinghy to which two small figures were clinging. The driver of the boat seemed to be flicking the steering wheel, so that the dinghy was being drawn back and forth across the corrugated wake of the boat. The two figures were hanging on like cats on the roof of a moving car. The boat came back around clockwise and as it turned, one figure loosened his grip, apparently intentionally; and the g-forces pushed him over the other figure and the dinghy moved under the weight and overturned and the two figures were thrown off and did a kind of gymnastic commando roll in slow motion and smacked the water. The boat did a lazy arc back to the two figures who were hauling the dinghy over itself to right it, and they pulled themselves out of the water and on board the dinghy, and the boat roared off again. The figures were William and Thomas.

They went around about twenty times. Then the boat idled in to shore and flicked the dinghy around in one lazy arc and the boys collapsed onto the shore, almost unable to walk, dizzied by the ride and the wake and the falls.

The rest of the time they raced go-karts around the dusty pathways of the park between the cabins. The park stretched around the lake from 5.25 to about quarter to eight on a clock. The lake looks large but its perimeter allows a slow run or a fast walk well under an hour. They print scenic run of the month in Runner's World but nothing has ever beaten the scenery around Lake Boort.

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Cabin No. 7 was at the end of a row, looking out over the lake. On the first night the sun had turned the lake and the sky orange as it went down and the orange flooded the cabin. The cabin had a covered platform like a low balcony out the front and we sat in the orange glow and ate dinner that I had cooked on sparkling utensils on a stove that was out of a 1970s kitchen cleaner commercial. It was so clean you could practically hear the jingle. The whole place was so spotless you wanted to hose the children down outside before letting them in, if at all.

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Sometimes you lose at travel lotto, and sometimes you win. I had passed through Boort (which means "Smoke on the Hill" or "Smoke on the Water" depending who you ask) some years ago and seemed to remember a resort by a lake, so we pushed on through Hopetoun and Woomelang, which sounded like one of those 1960s girl band songs, then onto the main highway before Wycheproof and off again and directly east on a B road to Boort.

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There was a sign on the manager's office: Under New Management. I had walked in and asked the usual question and yes, there had been several cabins available and the manageress had given me the keys to cabin 7. "You might see a mouse," she had said, "We've set traps. It's because of the harvest." I said that's OK, I'm not worried about mice, but I'll watch out for the snakes. They always come after the rodents. A man came into the office, obviously her husband. She told me they had been running the place for only three weeks and hoped the cabin would be OK.

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The husband was the pilot of the boat, and had taken his own son and his friends around the lake and then my boys. Then Alexandra had a ride and he went only a bit slower. The system was simple. If you wanted to go faster, you raised a thumb: and if was too fast, you turned the thumb down. I was the spotter in the boat on the second round. A brilliant plan; it worked beautifully until you realised that the thumb sign required one hand to be removed from the restraint rope on the dinghy. Ker-splash. Another rescue.

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We stayed three days.

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Destination summary: Smoke on the water, fire in the sky. Boort is a small wheat belt town that no-one has ever heard about unless they have been there. Let's keep it that way.

Accommodation summary: Every child in Australia should spend a week at the Boort caravan park. Leave their devices at home; or even better, bring them along and throw them in the lake for good.

Phrase of the day: Jump in the lake.

Comments

  1. Sounds like a fabulous place KH...and very good advice about "devices". The lake would be a perfect resting place for them

    ReplyDelete
  2. This sounds lovely. You certainly hit the jackpot at this destination.

    ReplyDelete

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