Thunder
Downunder 2000!
Photos by Anthony
Cornelius
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We We left relatively early this morning, we had to get down towards Gulgong to meet up with Doc, Jane, Clyve and Michael Thompson had also joined the party. It was a bumpy ride along some of the NSW roads (well, every NSW road is bumpy, but the minor roads are twice as bumpy!) We met up at the lookout there, with yet another great jubilation of greetings! Everyone was excited to see each other, and there was a discussion on the glaciating Cu to the north. Today was a marginal day, if anything it’d just be pulse storms on the ranges, nonetheless we decided that we’d continue with the others to chase. We basically chased around the Premer area, it was watching pulse storms go up and down, but we could never get that close to them. A little bit of trivial fun – perhaps we shouldn’t have compared it to the previous 8-9 days, as it didn’t compare at all! But the fun in having other people too we hadn’t met in a while was good. The day before, we had contacted Jimmy – but they were already out of range. They had decided to go north of Charleville, and watched the storms from there. But on this day they tried to go south, and couldn’t – they got stuck in Cunnamulla as they couldn’t go south or east due to the floods still through the area, they looked to recede in another day or so though. Michael Thompson then thought of a new slogan for Jimmy, a “Cunnamulla Fulla!” After the day, we decided to head to Coonabanabran and seek accommodation. We got two cabins, a large and small one. Macca, Matt and I had the smaller one. We had some chinese take-away and watched some video footage, and showed some of the others our recent video footage. We stayed up later than usual, before everyone agreed it was time to get some sleep, as the following day may prove to be a little more fruitful with the introduction of some cooler air aloft in the upper levels. This was good in theory – it was Matt’s turn to have the double bed, so Macca and I took the bunk beds. They were different to the normal bunk beds though – they were springy – very springy. I had the bottom bunk, and ended up sinking straight to the floor! Macca had the top bunk, and ended up literally falling on top of me! This wasn’t going to work, you couldn’t even roll over without your spine snapping in two from the steep curve, so we got up (it was a struggle!) and dragged the mattresses onto the floor – much better! Of course, we ended up talking half the night for a couple of hours before eventually getting to sleep! Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
