OZ9/3: Cam & Min, our Adelaide Family

We headed toward Cam and Min’s house, buying a couple bottles of wine on the way as gifts.  They welcomed us warmly into their dry home.  They had a small pool in the backyard that was covered by a roof and windows.  They let us hang up our dripping tents in there (Joe and I set ours up since it was free-standing, small, and would dry better that way) and they offered us the washing machine for our clothes.  Such generous people!

Min made us dinner because she was cooking for the family anyway.  At the dinner table we met their foreign exchange student, who came down to eat with us but didn’t say too much.  The twins were away at a friend’s house for a sleepover.

They poured us wine and as the exchange student drifted off to his room, we drifted into the warmth of the wine and the house.  We talked and laughed, and Min told us stories about how she and Cam had fallen in love, which was an uncommon story.  Min is Chinese and her parents speak no English.  Even to this day, Cam and Min’s father communicate in grunts and gestures.  They showed us their wedding album, which was absolutely amazing.  It is the fashion in China to get all kinds of whimsical photos of the bride and groom, to tell a fairy tell story in pictures.  Cam, a rather large Aussie bloke, looked hilarious trying to be whimsical next to his delicate and beautiful Chinese wife.

Cam kept pouring and pouring the wine.  We went through both bottles that we brought, plus I think mostly finished another two liters.  We eventually realized that we couldn’t drink our glasses empty, because if Cam saw them empty, he would pour more straight away.  We all started leaving more and more in the glass to keep him from pouring us more.

On our way in the door that afternoon we had seen a small barrel with a spout on its side.  Cam brought this out after we had all had plenty of wine and explained that it was port that someone had given them at their wedding.  The port was to be left aging in the barrel.  He poured us each a medium size glass, but we didn’t know how to say that we didn’t deserve it!  Often when people are very generous, you insult them more by not accepting what they offer.  So we drank and felt guilty that we were drinking port that he had been aging and saving since his wedding.

Of course the next morning we found out that this was totally wrong.  The port was to age in the barrel, but you were supposed to drink a bit here and there and then top it up with more port to age.  We felt so much better about that!

As we talked and talked well into the night, I started to notice that Gwen was looking sleepy.  In fact, every time I looked over at her, her eyelids were somewhere between only half-open and entirely closed.  It was really funny to watch.  She wasn’t participating in the conversation at all, which is probably why she was fading so easily.  Eventually we said something to Min, who apologized profusely and led her off to her own room.

Not too long after Gwen went to bed, we all decided that it was probably a good idea to do the same.  The boys and I were going to sleep in the living room.  There were two mattresses in the room where Gwen was fast asleep.  We turned the light on and moved the mattresses out, yet she never once stirred.  Poor sleepy Gwen.

There were only two, so Joe and I slept on our camp mattresses.  It was so amazing to have a warm dry place to sleep!  And a place to brush our teeth and wash our faces.  Ach!  It was amazing.

We said goodbye to Min, who would be gone to work by the time we woke up in the morning.  She was so kind and generous.

Cam was around in the morning when we woke up.  We tried to not be up and moving about too late in the day so they wouldn’t think we were just bums.  I think Jojje doesn’t typically sleep very late ever though, so we were up at a very reasonable hour.

We packed our stuff up leisurely.  I took a shower and put the tent away, got reorganized with our stuff, and wrote a thank you card to leave secretly.  They even fed us cereal for breakfast.  We took a while reorganizing the packing system again in the driveway, but it made all the difference in the world that our stuff was now dry.  Before we left we got a photograph with Cam and I slipped the card in on the coffee table where they would see it.  The generosity could not have come at a better time, as the wet night before had made me very discouraged for the rest of our trip.

Us and Cam (minus Joe, who was a hero and took the photo)

We headed back to IKEA to figure out a packing system for the car and to buy some boxes for storing food.  Jojje bought only three boxes, I think with the idea that if he didn’t have a box to compare to others, we would not notice how much food he traveled with.  But I noticed.  Almost without fail through the three-week trip that we made together, Joe and I combined had less food than he had just for himself.  Joe didn’t notice at first and he would be totally perplexed and amazed by the quality of meals that Jojje would make, but once I pointed out how much food he had, he realized how easy quality meals could be.  The right ingredients take up a lot of space.  And to be honest, it was a little unfair that he got to have that much food the whole time.  We were way too stuffed on space for him to greedily be taking up two or three times the food space as anyone else.

Oh well though.  I was pretty proud of Joe and I.  We made a lot of creative and delicious meals with what we had on hand.

So anyway, Gwen and Marco fit two people’s food into two boxes and Joe and I fit two people’s food into one box, while Jojje didn’t try to compress his stuff at all.  Over the three weeks, we tried almost every arrangement of bags and boxes imaginable in the car and on the roof of the car, but it always came down to squishing one more bag in here, and another there.

We got a bit of organization however, especially once I lined the big backpacks along just behind the back seat.  I’ll take credit for the genius.  :)  I figured that they weren’t something we would need to get in and out of the car like our tents and sleeping bags, but if we did need something small from inside of them, we could just fold the seat forward and try accessing them without moving them.  This worked fairly well.