The CrossingToward Gundagai
Along The Road To Gundagai
After another 42.5 km on the Hume, I stopped short of Gundagai and we drove to Canberra for Gungahlin parkrun, rest, and the support waiting there. Gundagai would have to wait until after the side trip.
The Canberra decision had been made, but there was still a Friday of walking to get through first.
We had stopped about 25 kilometres short of Tarcutta the night before, so I started from there and followed the Hume through another wet, grey New South Wales morning. This was going to be a shorter day by HAA standards, but “shorter” had become a very strange word. It still meant 42.5 kilometres.
Early in the day, Gundagai appeared properly on the signs. Hume Highway. Gundagai 49.
That was close enough to feel like a real place rather than another name somewhere ahead. Two days earlier, Clinton Bishop had nudged me in the comments about the old Australian song Along The Road To Gundagai. So when the Gundagai 49 sign appeared, I sent the song back his way: just for you, Clinton.
The road signs were starting to stack the next run of names in front of me again: Gundagai, Yass, Goulburn, Sydney. After everything that had happened since Perth, those names were not intimidating in the way they once might have been. They were still a long way away, obviously, but I knew what a long way felt like.
Somewhere in that morning I had one of those moments where the scale of it all catches up with you. I looked back at the route we had already traced across the country and thought about the simple, ridiculous truth of it: all of it had been created out of single steps.
Perth. The Wheatbelt. The Goldfields. The Nullarbor. Adelaide. Melbourne. Albury. Now another wet stretch of the Hume.
None of that had happened in one big heroic leap. It had happened one step at a time, one session at a time, one day at a time. I was still the bloke who had once been 145 kg, smoking, and waiting for the heart attack headline. That version of me had not disappeared by magic. He had been walked away from, step by step.
That was the message I wanted people to take from HAA. Not that everyone should go and walk across Australia. The point was smaller and bigger at the same time: take the first step, then the next one, and keep going long enough for the impossible thing to become a thing you are actually doing.
Later the shire sign made it official:
Wagga Wagga bye bye.
Hello Gundagai.
Only, not quite.
We were making our way towards Gundagai, but we did not reach it on foot that day. We stopped just after 4 pm, short of town near Mundarlo, because the plan for the weekend had changed shape. After eleven more days of relentlessly moving forwards, it was time for a side trip to the nation’s capital.
Canberra meant rest, recovery, parkrun, relaxation, and hopefully catching up with Matt Napier, the fellow crazy man who had walked from Perth to Sydney while bouncing an AFL ball.
The support had already started before we even got to Gungahlin parkrun. Yani had paid for our accommodation in a unit at Ibis Styles Eaglehawk Canberra, conveniently close to the parkrun where she had invited us. Then she cooked and brought dinner to the unit as well.
There will be more to say about Canberra, because spoiler alert: we had an absolutely bloody brilliant time.
For now, though, I had not reached Gundagai yet. That would wait until after the Canberra weekend. The walking route stayed honest. My feet would go back to the right place.
But for one Friday night, stopping short was exactly how we kept the whole thing moving.
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Along The Road To Gundagai
The traditional Australian song Clinton had nudged me about before the Gundagai sign joke.
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