by Joe Roberts

Created on: May 04, 2008

It wasn't right. I had another look around. Nope, it really wasn't right. I had never seen two enormous grain silos at school before, and I was quite certain there had not been any recent plans to put train tracks through the middle of it. Not that these train tracks looked recent by any means. They were cluttered with any number of weeds and pieces of rubbish. Well, I suppose rubbish everywhere was familiar at any rate. Still, I was pretty sure I saw a tumble weed bounce along in the night breeze. That was when I shivered and felt very lonely. The bus had left and so had all the departing passengers. I started to wonder what I'd done to get there.

It started with a geography excursion. We had left school in a filthy old bus that didn't sound like it would make it up the first hill. It didn't. Thank God the handbrake held... for about a minute. Fortunately there weren't any cars behind us and with all our screaming we managed to snap the driver out of shock and get him to slam his foot on the foot brake before we smashed into a furniture shop. The driver finally rectified the situation somehow (I had my eyes firmly shut) and decided that a detour around the hill might be in order. We ended up having to take quite a few detours due to the hilly nature of our journey. We reached Murray Bridge in a record-breaking time of four hours. Pity it wasn't our destination. We were heading to a cave centre closer to the Victorian border. To amuse myself during this time, I picked moss out of the window frame.

We finally pulled up at the cave centre at around 2 o'clock. We had some important research that needed to be done there, so it looked like we were going to get back pretty late. As we stepped out of the bus we were greeted with the pleasant smell of burning oil, probably from the brakes. It made a nice change from the smell of exhaust, which had seemed to be emanating from beneath my seat during the trip. I wasn't sure why, seeing as every time I bent down to have a look, the stuff caught me in the eyes. My vision wasn't too brilliant for the rest of the day.

The teacher in charge led us away from the smelly rust bucket as quickly as possible, muttering something under her breath the whole time. She signed us in with the lady behind the desk who wrinkled up her nose as we entered the building. We were designated a guide who was quite eager to let us roam around the exhibits in the centre by ourselves, rather than keep us near him. I feigned interest in a few things

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