Everyone is OK, everything is fine

It has always been the intention of this blog, "exit turner", to be a light hearted summary of my travels, designed to inform, lightly amuse and occasionally lightly shock. To avoid undue levels of stress however, I am starting this post with the message that EVERYONE and EVERYTHING IS OK now. Worth bearing in mind, the "everyone being ok" part, alright ?

Anyhow, five of us began our road trip yesterday in a campervan - Kirri and Zibby (mother and daughter), Sayaka, a japenese exchange student, Mag, a French Backpacker and I. We started off heading North on a trip towards Exmouth, where I hope to learn to scuba dive. This plan was slightly altered by... oh, and remember, everyone IS ok... us crashing the camper van. Not just crashing infact, but as we were moving over a bit on a bend to keep away from a road train, then catching the soft shoulder, which started our van swaying from side to side. It was so top heavy and badly designed that the van osciallted more and more until it tipped to the right, at which point we were down to about 40-50km/h, and then we slid round to a halt, fortunatley hitting nothing. Lots of people came straight to our aid, and a shout of "fire" got us moving quickly out the vehicle. We quickly put out a small fire with sand from the road, and then the police arrive and sorted everything out.

A whole day and a half of sorting stuff out followed, during which the girls were diagnosed with a broken wrist (Zibby), broken elbow (Sayaka) and a few stiches (Mags). Being in the front seats myself and Kirri were unhurt, and are now back in Perth sorting paperwork out and getting a new SAFER van to drive back to the others (currently in a motel in Moora - the middle of nowhere) tomorrow and try and restart our journey. Not only was our old van really unsafe in retrospect (and a write off now), but I think we loaded it very top heavy and we could of put a lot more heavy stuff lower down. Either way, rest assured the next vehicle will have a wider wheel base, be much safer and be loaded a lot better - no more accidents I promise ! The girls won't be able to swim with there casts though, so probably not many stops for snorkelling on the cards, but everyone, as I believe I mentioned at the start of this, is OK.