Saturday, Oct 15th, Mission Beach

Greetings!

Today was an organizing day, staying two nights in one place, and making plans for the next week of places to visit.  It was also a time to attend to mosquitos bites, sore feet, grocery meals, walks on the beach in front of our house, and recovery from almost being hit by a train.

A train, you say.  Oh yes.  Not something we ever want to repeat.   Here's my tale, and I'm sure Pat has her own take.  Driving on the roads which are basically serving the sugar cane farms of the past on the tablelands, we cross frequently the narrow gage railroad tracks on which trains carry many large bins of crops.   There are no signals, and usually you can see left and right to detect if a train might be approaching.  In all the driving we'd done before the incident, I'd driven across probably fifty sets of tracks.  At this set of tracks, I was not going fast, but neither was I looking left or right.  Before I realized it, I was approaching the crossing and Pat was hollering.  To my left, a hundred feet away was a small train, blowing it's horn, and I had stopped with the front part of the car on the tracks.

My American car reaction was (and all of you who have driven cars with right hand steering will know) to grab the turn signal lever on the right hand side of the steering wheel, and try to find reverse.  Of course, it's on the left hand side in these cars, and my efforts were totally futile.  Fortunately, the train engineer ground agonizingly to a slow halt about a foot from our car.  By that time, I had found the gear shift, and was sheepishly apologizing to his yelling as I backed up as he passed in front of us.

I hope you never have the experience, and but for a train not able to stop, or our car being a few feet further, I'm not sure we'd have walked on the beach tonight.

To see the photos taken today, click on Saturday, Oct 15th, Mission Beach.