Sundown

I slept the sleep of the untroubled soul in the back of the Ute punctuated every three to seven seconds by the tocking of an unseen frog somewhere down by the waterhole.

The stream trickled away all night, white noise competing against the crackling of the fire.

It was cold.

My mobile phone, switched off, nevertheless sang out its techno alarm at 4.30am, swiftly silenced, and I awoke around the six o'clock mark, crawling out to find Will tending the burgeoning fire ready for baked beans and leftover snausages.

The plan was to go into uncharted territory the next day. We embarked on the 4-wheel drive from hell in Sundown National Park, bouncing over the most uneven stony ground imaginable, to arrive at a camping ground where there wasn't anything much then attempting to drive down to a lookout point only to find we'd been following the instructions from the wrong place and the lookout point as where we had been. Hmmm.

It was kind of fun, in a masochistic way.

We cut our losses and exited, opting instead to take a drive through deepest darkest New South Wales whilst rain clouds roiled around us.

We climbed down to the Rocky River on the slippery rocks, with some trepidation.

We saw a storm brewing over the Border Ranges and followed it under greying skies. Up in Brisbane it produced 35mm of rain in 20 minutes or something but we didn't see any of that. In Rathdowney the sun broke through.

We made it back around seven o'clock. Knackered.