Spelunking

Sunday:

On Thursday we went on an adventure to the Jenolan caves. Tim and I had both been there before as children. They were a bit further away than we thought, a full three hours drive. We bought tickets to one of the tours while we were still driving, so by the time we got there we didn't have time for lunch and went straight in.

You actually drive through a huge cave to get to the carpark! It is wide at one end but quite narrow at the other, only one car can fit at a time, and it felt very wrong to be driving through there. I didn't get a photo of that bit. This is the wide end.

The tour had been chosen because of the time it started, but it turned out that out of the nine or ten available we were on the most challenging one! 910 stairs in the cave itself (90 min tour) plus lots of stairs to get to the cave entrance. I found it physically exhausting going up, and emotionally exhausting going down narrow steep wet stairs in semi-darkness as I'm scared of heights. But the caves were pretty.

Then we had some late lunch from the very limited selection at the kiosk and drove home again. The first bit was very scenic and beautiful, then dense fog and rain as we went over the Blue Mountains back to Sydney, not so fun. It was an awful lot of driving, but Tim was happy that we'd got out of the house for a day.

The whole pool situation is still ongoing. Nothing much has happened for a month, now at least the workmen are back from holidays but it's still very slow. They come out and look at the concrete hole in the ground and tell us all the things that need to be done before other things can be done. The current issues are getting drainage and retaining walls so that any run-off during rain doesn't carry dirt into the pool (we are on a slope) and getting electricity from the house all the way back to the garden shed where the pump will be located. Expensive frustrating delays!

I've been having some exciting ideas for a new book, not in the same series as the one I've already written. Much darker. I've worked out in some detail the first half, but I don't know what happens after that yet. In my previous book I actually started knowing the ending and worked backwards, so this one is different. The author Stephen King says he generally just starts with a premise, like "what would happen in an evil car came alive?" and just starts writing. It seems to work for him! But I need to know where my story is heading before I begin, otherwise I'd just flail around and waffle on forever.