Phew - well we've come out of our 39 rail journey from Perth, across the Nullarbor Plain to Adelaide, and without too much lasting damage, neither.
I'd been dreading this journey, and have been loudly complaining to all who'll listen that Anne has forced my hand on the issue of going by train. She thought it would be "romantic". I disagreed. I thought it would be horrible and crowded. We couldn't afford a cabin, so would be in a normal train carriage for the journey - yikes. Plus some Lancashire half-wit in Freo told us it was a horrible journey and there'd be kids running up and down the aisle the whole time.
As it was it wasn't bad. The seats were comfy and there was lots of legroom, plus the "Red Kangaroo daynighter carriages" were more than half empty so we had four seats to ourselves (two sets of two facing each other). We managed to sleep better than we'd expected and the view of the Nullarbor (no trees - Latin fans) was good. We left Perth on Sunday morning, arrived in gold mine town Kalgoorlie at about 10pm. Anne and I had a walk around there for half an hour and then reboarded and put our pyjamas on (not really). The train left Kalgoorlie just before 2am, but we were sleeping. I awoke on Monday morning to a spectacular view of the Nullarbor. I was dead impressed and nearly woke Anne up to show her, before realising that would be bad, since we'd be seeing these views for the whole day!
Before lunch we stopped on Cook - a tiny town (population of 2) that's there just to service the Indian Pacific Railway. It used to be a proper town with a hospital and school, but that was before railway privatisation. We hopped off there for some photos and felt glad we weren't in the posh "Gold Kangaroo" cabins. This wasn't just because it would have costed 10 times what we paid, it was also because all the passengers there we bumbling old couple who would have just got in our way a lot! (I'm kidding - we'd have been locked up antisocially in our posh cabin the whole time.)
There was "video entertainment" but this mainly consisted of weird, rubbish films from the seventies and eighties. The choices were baffling - Bill Cosby's Leonard, Part 6 anyone?? We did watch some of Philadelphia, but since we didn't see it all and some important parts were ruined by announcements I'm not able to give a star rating. Mainly I read and listened to music and comedy on my CD player.
We awoke on Tuesday just before the train pulled into the station at Adelaide, on time, at 7.20am. What timing!