Friday, June 5th, 2009, Train and Bus Trip from Melbourne to Canberra
Bob: Our journey from Melbourne to Canberra was long but delightful. We spent the first 8 hours on the train to Yass Junction, and it was fun watching the fields, farms, and pastures roll by. Far and away the most common agricultural endeavor was sheep grazing followed by cattle raising and then a few horse farms. Although all the land appeared hot and somewhat dry, on a par with the middle section of Texas in the U.S., there clearly was sufficient rainfall to support grazing and the occasional foray into growing wheat or hay. |
Monika: It was time to move on. Melbourne had been delightful, but we had our tickets to go on to Canberra. We left the hotel in plenty of time to head slowly to the train station. We took our seats and enjoyed the trip to Canberra. |
Bob: I also enjoyed watching the different cloudscapes flow by overhead. The clear blue sky of the early morning gave way to wispy alto cirrus clouds, and by mid afternoon we were seeing some serious cumulus clouds building up. The latter included some huge anvil-shaped clouds that in the U.S. would definitely mean rain and most likely hail to boot, but I didn't see any signs of virga from the ones floating by our train window, so possibly they did not include precipitation. |
Monika: Bob took pictures of the landscape, while I just enjoyed the landscape rolling by. We had lunch on the train and I bought a couple of sandwiches for later. |
Bob: Just as it became really dark, our bus stopped a couple of kilometers North of the center of Canberra rather than over on the East where the train station appeared to be located. That was the first of several unpleasant surprises as it meant we were farther from our hotel than we had planned. There was a local bus terminal nearby, however, and a nice gentlemen volunteered to take us over and help us find the right bus to Curtin where our hotel was supposedly located. We accepted his gracious offer and thereby finally found a stop for the right city bus line only two blocks away. The bus arrived on schedule and we boarded and paid the $6 one-way fare. So far, so good |
Monika: In Yass Junction --- which really is just a stop where the road from Canberra joins the main Sydney to Melbourne rail line --- we said good bye to the train and boarded a bus to Canberra. We knew that our hotel was a little on the outskirts, and had thought of taking a taxi. But Bob started talking to a passenger next to us and he told us about the bus system of Canberra. So Bob thought with bus and GPS we should be able to find our hotel. |
Bob: Following our bus's progress on the GPS, I selected the closest stop to where the GPS indicated our hotel was located. We disembarked at that stop and started walking up a connecting street in the direction of Cotter Drive where our hotel was located. The bus map and GPS both indicated a fairly major connecting street, so I was unpleasantly surprised that it didn't have any sidewalks. Still, I could see the stoplight at the intersection on Cotter Drive up ahead of us, and that was a major highway, so I was fairly confident that it would have a sidewalk. As it turned out, I was confidently wrong. Not only did Cotter Drive not have any sidewalks, it also didn't have any buildings or any sign of civilization either to the right or to the left. The GPS indicated we should turn right, so we did, but rather than walk on either shoulder in the dark, we chose to trundle down the median strip. Unfortunately, it was beginning to turn muddy in the rain and our wheeled suitcases were quite difficult to tow, so we were starting to tire out when a very nice local lady named Karen pulled over to pick us up and drive us to the Greenleigh Motel, which turned out to be in the opposite direction from what the GPS had indicated. She extracted us from a situation that was starting to get unpleasant and could have gone on for quite a long time as I was confidently headed in exactly the wrong direction. |
Monika: Well, we finally found the right bus and with the guidance of the GPS we were let out supposedly close to our hotel. The bus driver sounded dubious and another passenger seemed just as dubious. But Bob had his GPS. Our first surprise came when the street was dark and did not have a sidewalk. But the next traffic light brought us to the street where our hotel was located. This was a country road which was equally dark and again without street lights. We followed the GPS pulling our suitcases in the median on wet grass. Suddenly a car joined us on the median. Our fairy godmother had arrived! She asked us, where the heck we thought we were going. When we told her the name and address of the hotel, she looked dubious but after two wrong attempts did manage to find it (hidden at the back of a long dirt driveway), all along mumbling about how this was not a good place to stay. Well we thanked her profoundly because, after all, the hotel was the opposite direction of the way we had been walking! |
Bob:
Wishing to avoid that kind of mistake in the future, I decided to conduct an informal Critical Incident analysis. As I often found in my aviation safety research, there were a series of contributing and direct causal factors to this failure.
Strategic level planning errors:
Not having an Australian cell phone ("mobile") so that we did not have an effective back-up plan such as calling a cab if we got lost as we did.
Believing that the phrase "Greenleigh Central Canberra Motel" indicated a hostelry centrally located in the city of Canberra rather than a "Bates Motel" at the back of beyond. Deciding to go for a reasonably priced "centrally located" mom-and-pop hotel rather than a more expensive major chain.
Tactical level planning errors:
Assuming major roads in the capital would have sidewalks; pulling wheeled luggage through the mud drastically decreased the distance we could walk to find our way if we became lost. Assuming major roads in the capital would have buildings with street numbers; failing to have any street numbers prevented me from double-checking the directions the GPS was giving me to get to 240 Cotter Drive. That combined with a failure to have a city street map with adequate detail to show the general trend of house numbers; the maps provided by the bus company showed the bus stops but no street numbers. Assuming the GPS would accurately guide us to our destination after it had accepted the address; apparently the street numbers can be inaccurately represented in the internal maps used by the GPS.
Contributing factors:
The dark and rain contributed to difficulties with navigation and stamina. Not having any visual range at all, I was forced to rely on the GPS and bus maps, but the former was incorrect and the latter was insufficient for exact navigation. As we finally discovered, the hotel was set way back from the main street along a dirt driveway and there were no illuminated signs for the hotel out on the main road. I'm really not certain that even if we had walked in the correct direction on Cotter Drive and ran across that driveway that I would have walked back along it in the complete darkness to see if our hotel was hidden back there.
Despite a series of errors and a lack of redundancy in essential systems like a city street map with house numbers, I did belatedly formulate a Bottom Line for stopping our wandering off into the darkness, which was to check the directions at the next roundabout and head for the center of Canberra or Curtin where we could reasonably expect to find a public phone. The Backup Plan was to call for a public taxi, give him the address, and let him figure out where in Canberra the Hotel Greenleigh was located. The backup plan if the taxi couldn't find it was just to find the nearest hotel with a vacancy and sort it all out in the morning. That emergency planning probably would have worked, but hauling our luggage those extra few kilometers in the rain and dark on the shoulders of busy roads would have been both rather dangerous and physically exhausting.
Bob: As it was we were worn out by the sheer tension of becoming lost in the dark and rain in a strange city in a foreign country, and very grateful to Karen who took the trouble to pull over and help us out of our pickle. After registering in the hotel, we had an evening snack and then collapsed in our room until it was time for bed. |
Monika: After Karen left we signed into the hotel and collapsed into our room, where we had the leftover sandwiches. The room was clean and the bed comfortable, so we just kind of fell asleep. |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Australian Walkabout | Epilog |
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