Going home

Being in a workers' camp reminds me of my days in boarding school. We wake up to an air horn, line up for meals to an air horn, have tiny little boxy rooms and get put to bed by a certain time every night. The food is just the same as boarding school. You can't complain about it, really. It's mass produced and not particularly interesting, but when you're feeding a hundred smelly fruit pickers on a tight budget it's pretty difficult to put any love into what you're serving up.

What really takes me back to the boarding school days is that feeling of being away from home. I miss my family. Not my parents - I couldn't give a shit - but my sister. Then there's my adopted family, the people who have accepted me and embraced me without question. That is home. I've made friends at the workers' camp, certainly. Good friends. It's an interesting and quite friendly place to live. From there I've been journeying through the surrounding area and exploring places of interest, learning new things, netting new experiences and moulding them into part of the ever-evolving version of myself. But always, underneath the wide-eyed wonder at all this new discovery, is the feeling of I miss home.

It was the same at boarding school. You've got your friends, your culture, the weekend projects of delinquency and all the fun that goes with mass living and having your mates h=just down the hallway. But at the end of term you're just happy to go home.

I'm home for the weekend. A ten hour drive on the most boring stretch of road I have ever encountered: Three hundred kilometres of road works, a near miss with a speeding fine, and some bitch in a four wheel drive's tow ball straight through my front grill in a traffic jam. I am home and all that is worth just being here for five minutes. I have to go back, and indeed I'm looking forward to continuing my exploring and experience-hunting, but I will go back with a renewed energy and lust for life after this small respite.