Our camping weekend to Cumberland River with Bobby and Norma (Marg’s older brother and his wife) their three children, Carolyn, Sandra and Jennifer turned into a mixture of success and disasters, reminiscent of the ‘Keystone Kops’.
Firstly, our bushwalk to the Cumberland Falls was a very pleasant one and I took heaps of beautiful photos only to realise back at camp that there was no film in my camera. Then, after Marg tried to break the world blackberry eating record, she had to make a b-line to the toilets and brought the whole lot back up again (she hasn’t been able to face up to them since them).
That evening, while we had a nice cosy fire going in the hut I was relating to an unpleasant episode we’d had with the resident ranger the previous time Marg and myself camped there and what an obnoxious asshole I thought he was. Unbeknownst to us, he had been standing in the dark doorway listening to me. He was livid and came to an inch of throwing us out there and then.
After that, we drank red wine well into the night and when we had all retired to our respective tents, Bobby decided to answer, ‘the call of nature’, only to trip over the only crossbar on the entire footpath, in pitch darkness, and almost broke his neck.
On the morning we were due to return home we consumed some huge jumbo-sized salad rolls for breakfast, which Norma duly deposited in a toilet bowl in Anglesea, after getting carsick on the rollercoaster ride of the Great Ocean Road. I hope that that weekend didn’t turn them off camping forever.