There’s something about the ritual morning cleaning of teeth. It’s a part of life that doesn’t really figure greatly – until the toothbrush goes missing. If, like us, you’ve progressed to the electric toothbrush then a flat battery amounts almost to the same issue. Scrubbing away with a miniscule brush head that used to whir just isn’t the same.
Charging is not a problem. We have either a 12 volt supply that looks after the computer, cell phone and satellite phone, and a small converter to create mains power for the toothbrushes and my shaver. So one guess as to who left the toothbrush charger behind!
No problems, we thought. We’ll simply buy another. Now in the wisdom of the manufacturer, they don’t sell chargers separately. OK, we thought, we’ll simply buy another toothbrush – that cheap one on special offer will do and we’ll have an extra head and body if we really need it. So who gets the only one in the shop with a duff charger? Yup, you’ve guessed it. As we’ve moved on, the only safe alternative is to get our daughter Sarah to mail us the charger we left behind. Today we picked it up from Cairns Post Office and can once again clean our teeth with impunity. Hooray!
Before leaving Cape York we visited Split Rock near Laura. It’s quite a hard climb to reach from the road but well worth the effort. Cave paintings dating back about 13,000 years (yes that is correct) remain. They’re not really ‘art’ in the accepted sense, rather some sort of impression of what the people of the time felt they needed to record. There’s fruit bats, a turtle, people and what were considered ‘spirits’. It’s all very interesting and we were the only people there.
Rather more modern history is presented in the old town of Herberton. The place is preserved as it was in the late 1800s through to the 1920s. On the revenue from gold mining the town grew rapidly and boasted a variety of stores including a pharmacy, grocery, butcher, farrier, cart maker and bakery. Later additions were a garage and a cinema. I was interested to find that the projector used until 1986 was a Simplex – the company I first worked for back in 1959.
It’s now time to head off west, following the Savannah Way right across Australia. There’s not many towns until we reach Darwin and so we return to Cairns to complete our shopping. With Vin Rouge filled with fuel, water and provisions, toothbrushes charged and we’re on our way west. First stop, not too far away, is Ravenshoe (apparently that’s Ravens-hoe, not Raven-shoe) where we see lush pastures and fat cows grazing. It won’t be long before the landscape becomes a lot more arid.
Oh yes, that toothbrush thing again. It turns out that the converter is burning out the chargers. There’s no other option but to invest in a couple of old fashioned manual brushes. At least nothing can go wrong with them.
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