looking for signs that you're stupid ...

I have no dout that Yarramalong, inland of Wyong on the NSW Central Coast, is a lovely little village. I might even choose to visit the sleepy little hamlet one day ... in daylight.

The first sign that I can be as stupid as all the coots of Centennial Park's ponds standing in a single column of stupid coots, each coot balancing on the shoulders of the coot beneath it (if coots have shoulders) came when I passed the sign for Yarramalong Public School, established in 1870 (see pretty picture).

I'm sure that if I'd actually known what I was doing at two-thirty a.m., as I drove the Transit van farther and farther along the Yarramalong Road towards the dead ends at Cedar Bush Creek and Ravensdale (both north-west of my initial point of departure ... Spike's parents' place in Dooralong) I would have seen SOME SIGN that I was travelling 18.4 KMS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION for a man who was trying to head south-east in search of the freeway to Sydney. Dickhead. That'll be a 40 kms round trip in the dark and misty conditions of a winding, undulating country road, which are simply THE BEST CONDITIONS imaginable for a quad with hand controls to drive his clapped-out, 14 year old, petrol powered automatic Ford panel van. So there's an hour of my life I'll never see again.

My defence is that I think there's a sign missing at the junction of Yarramalong Road and Old Maitland Road, when you're heading south. Travelling north along OMR you reach the T-junction at YR. A giant green sign points to Yarramalong. Another giant greet sign points to Dooralong. These signs confirm the easy to follow instruction's I'd received by SMS to guide my first visit to Spike's parents' place ... take the Wyong turn-off then it's LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, LEFT, LEFT. That makes the return trip easy peasy ... RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT.

Aha ...

Heading south there is no sign announcing FREEWAY THIS WAY - YOU DIP STICK. No green sign at all. There's a little blue and white sign, which reads Old Maitland Road (like that helps anyone without Google maps in their 1984 Transit van with 156,000 miles on the clock). And there's a BIG GREEN SIGN announcing FREEWAY JUNCTION 2KMS but that sign appears half a kilometre AFTER the turn-off ... so that's slightly less than wholly helpful to a man who was looking for the turn-off BEFORE he reached it in case, in his tiredness, inexperience, the dark, the mist and late-night / early morning uncertainty of the drive he missed the turn-off.

Got home at 4:30 a.m. In bed by the time dawn had broken and the birds were singing. Still, nothing could detract from a wonderful Saturday afternoon and evening with Spike at the Leonard Cohen concert in Pokolbin; nothing.
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