Читать книгу No One Said It Would Be Easy - Des Molloy - Страница 45

38

Tilbury Plus

home. In a letter home we contrasted our misery with the other holidaymakers who we knew were feasting on turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie etc., in their warm and dry caravans. I note our Christmas Dinner as being Stodge Special of rice, split peas, and egg noodles. I indicate things are on the up as we’ve been loaned a sleeping bag and that coffee and ham and eggs have been promised by another camper for the morning. After the final evening ablution by the other campers, we finally settle down on the concrete floor, the three of us in the one sleeping bag, pretty happy that things will get better. We are in the dry, have a heater blasting away and tomorrow’s forecast is for a much better day.

We are seen as a bit of a novelty and treated very kindly and generously the next day by the other campers. It was sunny and whilst not warm, photos show us looking pretty happy and amused by the tame squirrels. Clearly, we have to get better at handling the conditions when they aren't benign. To this end, we procure from a hardware store, a roll of sturdy clear plastic. This is a bit of a pain to carry but while we are still in cold and potentially wet winter conditions of the ‘deep south', it is worth the effort. The roads across to Houston were dull, and straight with the ride being non-eventful. The Astrodome was a major attraction that as sports’ buffs Lawrie and I couldn’t ride by. Our timing was good as there was a Yule-season game playing that night. Grid-iron was a complete mystery to me but Lawrie had followed it in his time in the US and knew the rules and most of the nuances. We hadn’t been watching for all that long when all the players stopped and just stood around. Nobody seemed to be injured, but nothing was happening.

“What’s going on now?” I ask.

“Oh, it is a live telecast, so this is an ad break! It’s one of the reasons soccer hasn’t taken off in the US … they won’t stop for ads, so get no live games on TV!”

We had one more night’s camping beyond Houston before Mexico. This was New Year’s Eve and it was spent in a farmer’s field, sober with not even a bottle of Mad Dog to engender some revelry. We could see it was about to rain so settled early, tent-less but completely under our roll of clear plastic. It was so big that we were able to lay it out, then lie down and pull it right over the top of us, tucking it in over the lower layer. It certainly wasn’t glamping, but our spirits were high just laughing at the ridiculousness of our situation … all recalling previous New Years' glories. It had been on New Year's Eve 1971, that with much fanfare, I had sailed from Auckland. Many hundreds of streamers connected us passengers on the SS Australis,