Sept 1992: Outback

FUN IN THE OUTBACK
      I wanted to tell you about all of the fun things that have been happening to me (and the other Grimms) since I last wrote in July.
      Item - Dorothy does a lot of publicity for the Alice Springs Rotary Club.  So one Friday night she returned home after attending one of their dinners and informed me that we had been invited to go with some of the members to Ayers Rock the next day to attend the chartering of a new chapter there.  The Rotary club was to pick up all expenses.  Something told me this was not as wonderful a deal as it sounded, but I agreed to go.  The next day Dwight dropped us off at the meeting place and sure enough there was a large luxurious coach sitting there as we got our bags out of my van.  However, before we walked the short distance to where the rest of the party was standing the coach drove off.  I wondered why.  I was soon to find out. Someone said, "OK, get aboard we're ready to leave."  I looked around and was surprised, then appalled to find a "Coaster" bus sitting there.  For those of you who have never had the wonderful experience of riding on one of these vehicles, let me describe it.  It is a bus no doubt meant for short commutes, built for a Japanese body - a small Japanese body.  The seats are narrow -OK so I'm a bit overweight, but not that much, and I'm not sure all of me was ever on the seat.  Leg room you ask. There is more in the economy section of the cheapest airliner.
      Every seat was full, including the back seat which was filled with luggage - oh, you thought there was a place to carry luggage. Wrong.  I said these buses were meant for commuting.  My base uses them for off-hour commutes to town and on the occasion that I have to use them, even the 16 miles to town is too far.  So the 250 miles to Ayers Rock was very, very long.  Including two stops at road houses which make a 7-11 look good, the trip took about 5 and 1/2 hours.  When we pulled up in front of the Sheraton I breathed a sigh of relief.  I was really looking forward to getting in our room and relaxing.  Wrong.  We didn't get off the bus.  We had to rush off to one of the sunset viewing sites (there is a great myth about Ayers Rock turning various colors at sunset) to a wine and cheese function thrown by members of the new Rotary Club.  After that memorable event, we returned to the Sheraton and got to our rooms about 6:45, and asked to meet at 7:30 for dinner.  Wrong.  They changed the time to 8.  For the price of a free meal, most of which I forget, I had to endure over four hours of speeches.  We finally got out of there at 12:15.  I just wasn't in the proper mood to go on partying with the people that invited anyone to their room for drinks.
      "So," I asked Dorothy the next morning, "what about breakfast?" Of course, she wasn't sure.  No one in the club had thought to make arrangements for us, so when I inquired at the dining room and found out breakfast was either $17 (continental) or an even larger amount for a full breakfast, we left and found a cute little take-away in the "village" - a small commercial area between the various motels. Later I had a small disagreement with the Sheraton front desk clerk who wanted to charge us $94 for the room.  The club had also forgotten to arrange that - but after I stormed off to find someone to straighten it out, the lady got on the phone and verified that the club would take care of it.  The trip back to Alice Springs was just as delightful as the trip down.  Now, every time I see a Coaster bus in town I'm sorry I don't have a rocket launcher to make sure it doesn't subject other people to this type of experience.
      Item - The boys kept talking about the movie "Wayne's World" and how good it was.  I was shocked when Dorothy decided she wanted to see it.  Reluctantly, I agreed to go with her.  It must be the generation gap.  I chuckled once.  The rest of the time, I spent looking at my watch a lot.  Dorothy said she liked it, but I think that was only to show there is no generation gap.  (She is not aging gracefully.)
      Item - For those of you who read about the 100,000-mile party about Dorothy's 1981 Datsun, I have to report the demise of the car. We were watching the evening news when we heard a large bang. Dorothy asked what that was and hurried outside to see her car missing and a man getting out of his car and suggesting we call the police.  I immediately thought the car had been stolen (it was no longer in front of the house.  But when we went out onto the sidewalk we saw that the car had been driven over the curb, turned around 180 degrees and crunched into the neighbor's fence, knocking the fence down.  A Holden (Australian GM product) station wagon had obviously hit our car in the rear pushing the rear end in badly to the point that the roof and doors were all distorted.  Dorothy yelled at the three Aboriginals walking down the street, "Hey, where are you going? You've ruined my car."  The two passengers came back and hugged Dorothy saying, "Me not driving, me not drunk."  The driver, meanwhile, fled the scene.  A group of people gathered and as soon as the police arrived, the two passengers didn't hesitate to tell the police the driver's name and the direction in which he had gone.  They caught him and ascertained he was drunk (I could smell the alcohol 25 feet away), but a lot of good it does us.  I think it is safe to make the generalization that Aboriginals don't carry insurance. After the police arrived, the two passengers decided that they had sore arms, legs, and heads.  To be on the safe side, the police called an ambulance.  While waiting for it, a bystander prayed for them and they both said that they felt better after the prayer.  The ambulance did take them both away.  Fortunately, the car was covered on our policy, and after arguing with the insurance company who wanted to give us $1000-1500 less then market value because it had left hand drive, we did receive a realistic payoff from them.  I would have paid any amount to have the car fixed, but I was told there was no way.  We would have had to have found a "body shell" (basically an entire new body) and taken the salvageable parts off ours.  It wouldn't have been the same anyway. Dorothy was devastated.  We bought the car new in 1981 and it has been back and forth across the ocean with us on both tours to Australia and both boys used it when they were learning to drive.

Item - Dorothy and I were invited to the Aboriginal community of Hermannsburg (see my last letter) to the Country Music Festival and were told we could even stay overnight.  Wow!  We decided we would go out to it just for the day (forget the overnight part).  We left early Saturday morning and it was a cold overcast day (unusual for Alice Springs).  I drive rather fast in order to get there by 9 a.m., for the "Horse Parade," forgetting they would be operating on N.T. time.  Fortunately I took a book, and sat on the back seat of my van off the main road in town reading while I waited for the big parade.  I think I was lying on the seat dozing when the parade passed by at 10:20.  I was told afterward that it consisted of a total of 17 horses.  I'm really sorry I missed it. From that excitement, we drove to the oval where the music was being performed.  I wasn't able to see in but I could hear the music. Rather than pay to go in and stand around being cold listening to the melodious strains of the less-than professional groups, I chose to stay in the van reading while Dorothy went to take pictures. I was starting to get concerned that I would finish my book when Dorothy returned somewhat over an hour later.  We had a scrumptious meal from the town's take-away (fish and chips) and drove home.
      Item - I took over a week off to spend with Dwight prior to his departure. One of the things I really wanted to do was go out golfing with him again.  We kept putting it off, because Dwight was still not ready to leave and his friend Adam was working on a paper for school. We finally decided to go out on the Monday prior to Dwight leaving on Tuesday afternoon, the 15th.  Well, we didn't have to worry about other people on the course.  No one else was crazy enough.  We had winds that were so strong that at one point Dwight and I on the left side of a fairway couldn't see Adam on the right side due to the dust in the air.  I joked that instead of golf carts (which we weren't using) we should have rented camels.  I didn't play well, no big surprise since this was my sixth time in as many years.  My best shot of the day was my last - a 20-25 foot putt using my 1920's wooden shafted putter bought at a lawn sale for $5. I guess we should have been glad the wind was blowing.  Because we had a relatively mild winter here, the flies are terrible.  It is hard to explain how bad the flies can be here.  But in similar conditions a year or so ago, people were wearing fly nets just to go out walking around town. In March 1991, Dorothy saw people wearing fly nets inside the Sheraton at Ayers Rock, only raising them slightly when trying to eat.
     Well, this is not all a tale of woe.  Dwight did spend the summer here and it was nice to have him home.  Unfortunately, he was only able to find about four weeks of work.  He spent a lot of the remaining time cutting pictures out of back issues of the newspaper which he had taken over the years and put them in notebooks possibly for use in looking for a job in the future.   During his last several days in town, another friend of his arrived in town for a seminar.  Sidney Watts is one of those "larger-than-life" characters.  He is an Aboriginal - not very tall, but a big guy. The first time we saw him this time, he came into our house lugging a large ice chest containing some very large frozen fish.  He is currently working in a small town in Western Australia and had brought the fish all the way from there to send out bush to his mother.  It turns out he missed the once-a-week flight and did not get to send them to his mother.  He gave them away.  Sidney loves video games - he spent a lot of time at our house and at Adam's house playing them, and loves to gamble.  He had to travel through Perth to get to Alice Springs and had missed his flight in the early morning because he had spent the entire night at the Perth Casino. He had won $300 in $1 coins there and had not had a chance to cash them in and brought them with him. when Dwight and he went to the Casino here, Dwight was to keep Sidney's money for him so he wouldn't spend too much, but in the few minutes Dwight spend at the cashiers, Sidney had already lost 30 $1 coins in a slot machine.  At least on this trip Sidney did not spend several hundred dollars buying numerous people drinks as he had on occasions in the past.
      I was afraid we would never be able to replace Dorothy's car to her satisfaction, but believe it or not, less than two weeks later, we went to an auction at the YMCA and a local car dealer had sent three older cars to be auctioned.  One was a 1980 Datsun Sunny (the same model with a different name) as Dorothy's car, different color (green) and a right-hand drive.  But Dorothy was willing for me to bid on it.  There was a reserve price on it that was more than I was willing to pay, so I called the dealer and made him an offer that he accepted.  We again have enough cars (three) that I even have one at my disposal.
      I might not have enough desire for the adventure of staying overnight at an Aboriginal community, but Dorothy recently travelled with a couple in their four-wheel drive to the community of Yuendemu, approximately 4 hours by road (mostly dirt) from Alice Springs.  She covered a number of events there, including the opening of a new adult education building, and returned safely the next day. 
      Dwight left Alice on September 15th, spend several days in Sydney with his friend Adam and returned safely to Stanford on the 19th. I really think that is all I have to relate for now.