Sunset Strip

This is Sunset Strip, a line of holiday houses in the middle of the outback, set on Menindee Lakes. Except there's no water in this part of Menindee Lakes anymore. It's about 110 kilometres out of Broken Hill, which in itself is about 1200 kilometres west of Sydney. I got in the car and drove 2500 kilometres in five days. The kids didn't want to come, they're sick of beetling or pottering around the country with dad - who wants to drive all night or potter from cafe to cafe, depending on the mood. Out there, there are different reasons for being. He slept in the car and heard the birds wake at dawn. He picked up the wierdest hitch hiker outside of Forbes, and delivered him eight hours later to an isolated part of the river outside of Menindee township. He didn't seem the least bit surprised to be plucked from one obscure part of the state and placed 500 kilometres away exactly where he wanted to go. Delivered at one a.m. down a sandy track. He was alcoholic, plus, pills or something. He couldn't talk properly, but seemed harmless enough. Everyone says I shouldn't pick up hitch hikers. I hitch hiked so much as a kid, it doesn't seem right to drive past them when I'm an adult. He was meeting up with a friend of his and they were camping by the river. He said they liked Menindee because it was free, no camping charges. I've lived this life for 20 years, he said. I believed him. At the end of the sandy track, where no cars could pass and I had been forced to turn around, he had apparently found his friend. For I saw the pair of them in the pub the next day, where I was having a steak sandwhich and gazing at the television as if it was a bit of civilisation at last. They were both bent out of place in a different time warp, and if he was wierd, his friend was equally so, equally unable to speak properly, of the same shortened stature. They didn't spot me, thankfully, as I crawled into the corner and disappeared. They bought their carton and departed, and the locals looked at each other when they had left. What's that, pot? Asked one, what does that to you? They shrugged and grumbled into their beers, the world was just too wierd and out there, where the city folk lived, was getting worse. Even they could feel it, way out here.