cherries

My good woman and I hit the road just after seven in the morning. You can feel the heat to come building. We must cover 860kms today, from Croydon, across the border into NSW, around the back of the Blue Mountains to Katoomba. We take 13 hours to get here.

The heat belts down on the new Caddy, the first car I’ve owned that tells me the outside temperature, as it breezes up the freeway. It stays in the mid-thirties all day until we scale the Blue Mountains after dark. Up over a thousand metres we drop into the mid-20s.

Mid-morning we stop and wander round Euroa, buy bananas and orange juice for the journey.

From home to the NSW border I stroke my good woman’s right leg. As the heat builds she strokes me with those scented towelettes, removes the sweat and grime of the journey; the alcohol evaporates, cools and soothes. Sticky hands and gritty neck feel OK for an hour till she repeats the exercise. What a boon companion she is.

Somewhere north of Holbrook in the grim gravelled yard of a fast food place an old bloke sells cherries, my favourite fruit. He’s a long way from Young where he says his cherries come from. We purchase ten dollars’ worth, endure his interrogation—the bikes in the back of the Caddy, our occupations. He takes me for a technician. Lonely selling cherries a long way from home.

The cherries become our lunch as we push into the early afternoon heat along the concrete two-lane through the rolling hills of southern New South Wales to Gundagai. We eat by a dingy billabong of the Murrumbidgee. I live out the childhood memory of my first trip in the family car up the Hume by having a milkshake in the art deco Niagara Café. Half Gundagai’s main street is art deco.

Not long after we leave the multi-lane freeway for back roads through Cootamundra, up onto the plateau where the cherries grow at Young. We pass countless roadside vendors till I can take no more: we stop and purchase a chilled box of two kilos of lush big black cherries.

The heat never lets up through Young and Cowra. My work phone rings but I don’t answer. We stretch by the Lachlan at Cowra, detour for a quick wander round historic Carcoar. A community event is on: families spill from cars, the smell of barbecued sausages ignites the air. My good woman falls in love with the town, and so do I.

I gun the Caddy back out on the highway: still such a long way to Katoomba. It’s a long way to anywhere, but with my good woman beside me tis better to travel than to arrive, though when the arriving finally happens it’s pretty good too.

Rock on.