Last night we camped in the carpark of an RV friendly winery (Brown Brothers) in Milawa.

Location: Brown Brothers Milawa Vineyard
239 Milawa-Bobinawarrah Rd, Milawa VIC. Map.

It was a large flat open area that had been specifically set up for campervans & caravans. We shared it with about 7 or 8 other rigs and there was oodles of room.

Just after we arrived Kelly got chatting with another couple and before we knew it we had been invited over (along with a bunch of others) for cheese, dips and sundowners.

Sitting in a large circle in our camp chairs as is RV life tradition, a table of shared food (cheeses, dips, nibbles etc) was set up in the centre and after some brief introductions enthusiastic chatter diverged off into a squillion different overlapping conversations.

Of course, the COVID-19 situation was discussed at length….and I must say I felt a little hypocritical sitting in a circle of around 10 strangers that were all sharing food and discussing a droplet spread contagious virus that is hand to face changing the world as we know it.

My desire not to be too unsociable grated against my instinct to be way less sociable than this situation was requiring. Especially at one point when mobile phones began being shared around the circle, as people compared trip photos. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.

In the end (and feeling like a total germaphobe) I declined any of the food that was passed around, clumsily juggling the mobiles down the line like hot potatoes. Soon enough I excused myself on the pretext of having to take Juno for his evening constitutional.

I felt like a goose.
What I should have done is simply suggested that considering the current situation we all just eat our own food, spread the circle out a little wider, and not swipe each other’s phones with our dip-sucked fingers. Especially as the group seemed like a really interesting bunch and they were definitely warming up to a most enjoyable evening.

Instead I snuck off sheepishly.

Back to Ripley to wash my hands thoroughly before returning to extract Kelly from the evolving fun under another pretext: that she was probably going to die in some overcrowded emergency department during an attempted intubation by a proctologist if I didn’t physically carry her away from this virtual zombie apocalypse of finger-licking, hummus dipping, Petrie dish swiping, maniacally laughing ragtag bunch of RV public health hooligans.

OMG. Tell me this is not what I have become.