Extra-Terrestrial Activity!

Ern has been looking forward to this weekend since we arrived up here. A whole weekend devoted to extra-terrestrial activity! Ern’s idea of heaven.

Saturday was spent attending the “C-Files,” with guest speakers discussing UFO sightings and abductions, nothing of which Ern didn’t already know. The highlight being the old guy in the audience, wearing a reptile mask, interrupting the speaker to announce that the USA has an alien spacecraft that landed at Roswell! Hot off the press. You don’t say.

We learned about the hierarchy of alien life forms in our universe, and Daph and Ern concluded that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are most likely a source of entertainment to these higher beings, regularly featuring in the nightly news bulletins...

“Tonight, on Arcturian News, humans behaving badly.”

We are lucky that the Arcturians feel a protective fondness towards us and that their Starship Athena is orbiting the Earth, defending us from the Reptilian attack.

The whole town gets involved. All the shopfronts and the foreshore are decorated with alien paraphernalia, and the Men in Black were in town seeking our assistance to thwart an alien invasion through a search-and-find information hunt. Daph thought they were in with a good chance of winning, considering the average age of their opponents was eight years old. She was on a mission.

We made the mistake of assuming that all the clues would be within walking distance of each other. Two kilometres into a long walk down a dusty dirt track, in the scorching sun, a la “Stand by Me”[1], on a search for the oldest gravestone in Cardwell... and Ern loses his enthusiasm. Daph tried to distract Ern by reading ahead on the clues to work out where they should head next... an hour's walk to the boat ramp to determine if the aliens could land via sea. Ummmm. Nope. Ern was tapping out. But Daph remained confident, desperate to defend the Earth.

We walked back to the caravan park, jumped in the Kombi, and sped off, desperate to complete the mission, doing so with only two minutes to spare. We didn’t win. Daph suspects the competition was fixed. Bloody kids.

And what’s the best way to wrap up this weekend of celebrating all things out of this world? To dress up like aliens and drunkenly dance the night away on the foreshore to a rock cover band.

Oh, Cardwell. You little gem.

[1] 1986 movie about four friends who go on a hike to find the corpse of a local teenager. Great movie.