We were on the road by 8:00am, heading to the mountains. Still a little tired, I napped for part of the way, and sometime later we arrived at a roadside seafood restaurant. We met the rest of the “group,” twenty people in total. They brought out the food and we started eating. The plates were quickly empty, and I thought, “Hmm, still a little hungry.” Somebody joked, “OK, let’s go,” and everybody started laughing. What I did not know, or what had been lost in translation, was that we would be having something like ten courses.

An hour later I hobbled away from the restaurant, climbed into the car, and started napping again.

A few hours later we reached the initial campsite. It was not quite where we had intended to stay, but at least it was available. We put up our tent and started to walk around. At dinnertime, we walked up to the Aboriginal shops and into a restaurant. Every shop along this route somehow knew Peggy, so good food and discounts were around every corner. Dinner was good; however, I started to feel as though all I was doing on this trip was eating and sleeping.

As we left the restaurant, I started joking about sugar cane. In China, I had seen people buying it and wanted to buy “just a piece.” Apparently, you had to buy one of the long stalks, perhaps fifteen feet long, while I only wanted a small piece. Peggy heard me mention this and told the owner of the restaurant. She quickly went to where the vegetables were kept, pulled out a black, bamboo-like stalk, cut off a piece, and gave it to me. “Here you go.” I was delighted! My fascination with sugar cane began when my dad returned from Hawaii and gave me a piece that was rock hard and had to be treated like a popsicle: licked rather than eaten. Now I had fresh sugar cane but did not know how to eat it. The owner called over her eight-year-old son to show me. I peeled the cane with my teeth, just as he did, and bit into the sweet core. It was delicious and quite fun to eat.

Walking back to the campsite, we noticed a group performing an Aboriginal-style dance and watched for a few minutes. Finally, we curled up in bed and fell asleep.