Christmas day sunset

Christmas day I decided to keep riding. It didn’t feel at all like Christmas, apart from the calls home to remind me what I was missing. It was windy as hell Christmas day and pretty unpleasant riding. That said when I got to the roadhouse at Wooramel the sunset was spectacular, which put a gloss on the end of the day. The roadhouse was closed so I kipped in a sheltered area out the side for the night.

The next morning at the roadhouse I decided to treat myself to a decent breakfast. The owners were up from Perth giving the managers a holiday and they were into bike touring, so we had a decent chat about my trip and the road ahead. Later in the day I got to the Overlander roadhouse at the turn off to Shark Bay. I took a break from the heat and the wind for a cold drink. There was an English girl working there, about as obnoxious and rude a person as I ever met. There was also a Malaysian girl too, it was her first day and the English chick was bullying her in front of the customers which was pretty appaling. The Malaysian girl was sweet and I asked her for water to refill my bottles. The English chick was obviously listening from inside the kitchen and came flying out saying no I can’t, that I have to buy it if I wanted drinking water. At $5.70 per 1.5 litres it’s not really cheap, but she wasn’t budging so I asked to see the boss, who was a severe looking woman.

She was adamant that I couldn’t have any drinking water, that it was too expensive. This is fair enough the next roadhouse was only 60km away so I wasn’t desperate but I was pissed at the English twits behaviour so I got stroppy and made a scene. In front of the other customers I demanded that even after spending nearly $20 on food if she was willing to let me cycle off with no water in 40+ heat, willing to let my suffer heatstroke, dehydration and maybe worse because she was too tight! I turned to the lady behind me and told her to put her stuff back on the shelf, that she’d be better served spending her money at a place that appreciated their customers stopping to give them business. That made her change her tune, and all of a sudden she was full of Christmas cheer, “Seeing as it’s Christmas, go on into the kitchen and fill your bottles”. So I filled my bottles and as I was walking out I flicked 10 cents onto the counter, just in case she thought she was giving me a gift. Score one more to me! I was so pissed at their arrogant attitude there, if I could have taken back the money I spent, I would have done so. Keep going if you ever pass the place!

I got to Billabong later in the evening and decided to call it a day there. The wind has been really cruel, it had been relentlessly blowing from the south right into my face since I left Exmouth and even though I’m doing shorter days I’m more tired at the end of every day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 10:43 am by Ross and is filed under Australia, Western Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.