We were on our way to Byron Bay and had already battled through six hours of Easter holiday traffic to get within sniffing distance of it. Last night, the Squifter cooked-up a magnificent sweet and sour chicken on the promise that I would deliver spaghetti bolognese to her lap tonight. I thought that I had bought all the necessary ingredients yesterday, because it’s Good Friday today and almost every retailer is closed. Like the doofus I am, of course I forgot to include one of the critical components: tomato sauce. In addition to the big drive, today’s sub-mission has been to find someone to sell me tomato sauce so I can make good of my spagbol promise. A while ago, we passed a road sign saying “supermarket open –>” and, driving on, I reassured Squiffy that there’d be another shop in the next town. I was wrong. The petrol station was open but, alas, didn’t stock a great line in anything remotely pasta-saucy.

Whilst I was inside the petrol station, Squiffy made a sneaky phone call to a campsite in Byron Bay — being the start of the Easter break, she was concerned that getting a pitch might be more difficult than usual. Rightly concerned: all campsites in the town are full for the next three days. We’re told that, in addition to being Easter weekend, Byron Bay is hosting a blues festival which will bring in fifty-thousand punters to a place not much bigger than the head of a pin.

We’re in Ballina, the last major town before Byron Bay, and after dipping into the town’s last motel with a vacant room–for an astonishing AUD$120 a night–we hot-footed it to the tourist information in the hope of some local guidance. As luck would have it the town’s campsite had had a last-minute cancellation (the forecast rain had put off less hardy campers); we jumped into their spot. The campsite manager even sold me a jar of tomato paste from her own personal stock. Everything was going great!

Until, that is, we discovered that, almost uniquely, the campsite had no kitchen. No worries mate, we’ll use our two-burner gas camping stove for a change. And so I chopped the mushrooms and onion, oiled the frying pan and had Squiffy measure the pasta into a saucepan of water. You can imagine how our faces fell on the discovery that our super-cheap gas stove had developed a rather serious leak. A miniature rethink later, and we were barbecuing our beef- and onion-filled frying pan and pasta-in-water pan; pushing in dollar coins to heat the hotplate for ten minutes at a time. As anyone with the slightest scientific mind can imagine, the heat transfer from a camp barbecue to a saucepan of cold water is poor. After throwing two dollars at the problem, it was clear that the beef wasn’t doing much either so I emptied it directly onto the hotplate. To cut a very long cooking story short, the meal turned OK. Turns out, if left long enough, pasta will just about soften-up even without hot water and it is possible to warm tomato sauce in a frying pan on a barbecue, as long as the surface area is large enough…

By the time we had finished our luke-warm food, it was dark. And our recently-cleaned tent was still in the safety of its own carry-bag. We’ll likely stay in Ballina for the next three days or so and so convinced ourselves and each other that we should erect the tent, thus allowing us to leave our vehicle in “car mode” so that we could drive around as we pleased. It was quite a tough decision to unpack our tent: the memories of collapsing our wet, muddy tent onto ourselves and into the back of the car during Syndey’s hundred-year-storm is all too vivid.

I’m pleased to tell you that the tent pitching went a lot better than the night’s cooking. We’ve now pitched and striked* our oversized tent so many times that we can almost do it with our eyes closed. I like to think that we won some credit for the Westies** tonight.

As the saying goes, “it never rains, but it pours” and after the cooking palava, pitch-black tent pitching, the rain came in and poured down on us for the reminder of the night.

* Or should that be ‘struck’, anyone?
** Without talking to us, most folks think we’re from Western Australia, judging from our car’s numberplate. You don’t see many of them WA plates round these them there parts, ya know.

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