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Published: April 10th 2011
Blog Day 947
Well, I thought I had better round up our lives as to what has been happening since our last blog.
Having come back from another frantic trip, then going to Sydney to pick the new truck up, I had squared away with my boss that I was going to have 3 days off R&R, so getting back to Canberra from our excellent weekend in Sydney, I was looking forwards to spending a bit of time, doing nothing, yeah right!
I took Caroline in on the Monday morning and headed out to a district called Woden to get a road worthy certificate on the cruiser, this is our first new truck in Australia, so I couldn’t understand why I would need a road worthy certificate, it was a brand new truck, but like the life we have, we just have to suck it up and get on with it.
I had been advised to go to a certain place to get this task done, I had booked a slot and driven in. I gave the guy all the paper work we had and took a seat with a cup of coffee, whilst they did
Caroline's Birthday Sparkler
The Birthday Cakes, Sarah Madetheir thing.
Half an hour later, he re appeared saying “it was all done and that would be $55.00 dollars” which didn’t seem too steep so I paid, and went to the piece of the puzzle.
When we had picked the truck up, it wasn’t registered, we could not register it in New South Wales as we have no proof of address there, so the only option we had was to register it in the ACT. We were given a travel permit which allowed us to drive the vehicle legally for 7 days, until we got it registered, and now armed with our road worthy certificate, proof of address, and the dealers paperwork, I was off to get the beast registered.
The lady was helpful enough, slid the new number plates under the window of the counter, she told me the total value to register the vehicle and it was over four grand. “Pardon” I said and she told me the figure again, and the lady proceeds to tell me, that most of the registration element is stamp duty. “Uh! Stamp duty!” She replied “Yes Stamp duty, has to be paid on new vehicles.” Oh well, I
Flower
Caroline was testing her new Macro lens dished out the dough and headed off.
I got home and on route phoned Caroline to tell her of the registration of our new baby, once at home I set about sorting the fixing of our new number plates.
I forgot to mention one tiny detail, when we picked the new truck up, we sat in the Finance blokes office, handed over our wedge and he asked me if I had “Neat Hand writing” to which I exclaimed that it wasn’t too bad.
He presented me with
two pieces of cardboard and a thick black pen and gave me a number to write on both pieces of cardboard, which I dutifully did.
After he checked my work, which was flawless of course, he said, I am just going to fit these and I realised they were our “Permit Plates”, Caroline had been worried about how we would pay the toll without a vehicle registration plate, but now it was all becoming clear. We were still able to log the details onto the website which enabled the system to track the number.
Anyway, back to where I was, we were now the proud owner of
Card Board Plates
This was the cardboard plate on the new cruiser a new set of number plates and all I needed to do, was remove the old bits of card board and fit the new set of registration plates and we were all set to go.
After tracking down, some suitable stainless steel machine screws the job was done to my satisfaction.
I enjoyed by three days off, and just pottered around doing bits and pieces, soon it was Thursday, and we were both back at work and it was nice to be back at my desk in the Canberra office “Being Normal.”
Friday 1st April arrived, and a couple of important things require mentioning here, as in 10 years time when we read our memoirs we will have forgotten these important details. It was one of my longest school mates birthdays today, Paul Roach, I never forget his birth date, possibly because it is April Fools day, I managed to have a quick Skype with Paul, who for a couple of years has been working as a Consultant in Israel but now he tells me he is back in Dubai.
The second important event, is Ted and Jan’s son in law, Justin, is setting off today
Mexican Feast
At the Hanily's on the gruelling 1400K’s cycle from Sydney to Melbourne “Tour De Cure” raising money for cancer research, we will follow Justin’s progress and will hopefully see him on the TV on Sunrise in the mornings. The tour, comes into Canberra and we will do our best to catch up with him and give him our support, as we well know how hard it is to raise money for Charity.
Friday night, we knew Helen Sheridan was coming into Canberra, as her and Susan were off to Vietnam on Saturday morning, we were invited out to dinner at “all bar nun” and we will never miss an opportunity to catch up with Helen, as her, Robert and Woodstock, have played a massive part in our lives and we consider them as family, a position Helen and Robert may not be too pleased about.
It was great to see Helen and Susan and her friend Belinda, we sat and chatted, the evening away, Helen looked really well, but I did think she looked tired. (Sorry Helen). Like I said, they were off to Vietnam for 3 weeks and we hope they have a great holiday. Incidentally, this is the first
Red back Spider
Again Caroline was testing her Macro Lens time we have met Belinda yet we have stayed in Belinda’s House, if you were reading back in January last year, Susan invited us to stay while Belinda was on holiday, it was then that the work thing came up and we decided to stay, the rest as they say is history, oh yes just to clarify though, Belinda did know that we were staying in her house!
The weekend arrived and as usual we fell into a big heap, we were looking forwards to just having some time to do nothing together. The autumn weather is just glorious at the moment, the temperature being just nice at around 20-24 degrees, and Sunday was no exception.
Bec had asked us if we wanted to go Kayaking on Lake Burley Griffin on Sunday afternoon, which sounded like fun, so we met at the boat house and hired 3 Kayaks for an hour and paddled around the enormous lake in the Sunshine.
Just for our amusement we actually kayaked through the fountain, the plume of water probably rises 100 feet up. I am trying to recall this fact as I type this blog on a Sunday morning at 06.50, so don’t criticise if I have got that fact wrong and we got absolutely drenched, well you would! We had a great time on the water and it was nice to see the lake and Canberra from a different prospective.
Monday came and it was business as usual, we drove into town and at the moment the Autumn morning Skyline usually has at least a couple of hot air balloons somewhere near Parliament house.
In the middle of Monday afternoon, Caroline advised me that “Justin, and the Tour” would be in Canberra tonight on Northbourne and he would be, around possibly at 6.00pm and we should leave work and go and see him.
As usual we put a full day in at the office and as soon as work was finished hurriedly crossed town, to get there in time, which we did by the skin of our teeth. We parked the truck and instantly saw him, chatting to someone, so we sidled up and made our introduction.
He looked really well and said the cycling was tough but great, he is one of these great people who just gets on with it, without any fuss or bother. Justin was telling us, that they visit schools to tell the children what the tour is all about and said that, it was tough listening to the children who have their own encounters with cancer and the emotional side of this is quite tough as non of us are that far away from the effects of disease.
In the evenings after a days ride, they have guest speakers and I suppose listening to other people’s stories of sadness is hard on the soul, especially when you have your own emotional burdens to carry, but I guess this is what makes us, who we are.
It was great to catch up with Justin, we were fascinated to see loads of massage table’s with riders queuing for a message and the luxury of an ice pool to be dunked in, and all out side for the world to see, how cool was that?
We didn’t encroach too much on his time as, he needed to wind down, and have time to catch up with the family and the possibility of a cold beer and dinner, so we wished him well and left him to get on.
Tuesday evening, was our 4 wheel drive club meeting at Beaurepairs in Gungahlin, which is a tyre dealer, in fact Beaurepairs are a country wide tyre dealer and one of our club members who works for them had organised a sausage sizzle and a talk from a Goodyear technician about all things rubber, well tyres.
It was a great evening and I have missed the last couple of meetings, but Caroline had managed to go, so it was nice to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a while, and its really good to look over other people vehicles to see what has been done to them and hopefully pick up some tips. We were handed our certificates for our senior first aid course we did a while ago and we thoroughly had a great evening.
Wednesday, was Caroline’s birthday and she had a lot of cards from people all over the place, we went out to lunch in Manuka, pronounced (Marnika) and had a nice time sitting in the sunshine lunching. A big chocolate cake and a gathering of colleagues for afternoon tea to wish Caroline a Happy Birthday went down well, but Caroline did say that she felt a little sad as she had a lot of messages from friends and family in England and they all said those little words “miss you and wish we could celebrate with you.” These moments do make it a little bittersweet, we are doing something that we had dreamed of and yet there is always the reminder of what you have moved away from.
On Friday, I needed to pay for our first aid course and I did the bank transfer and phoned Sue Briggs, the wife of Les who is in our 4 wheel drive club, I advised Sue that I had transferred the money and she said, “I believe we have a mutual friend.”
“Do we?” I responded. “Yes, we do, Sharon Blighton.”
Now we need to go right back, to when we were travelling, blog day 134 date 21 March 2009 , we were at Princess Margret Rose Caves and met a family, Sharon, Tim and Wade, who had a T-Van and came and sat around the fire we had made and just chatted away. If you wanted to read that blog it’s called “
Rain doesn’t seem to dampen their Ardour Anyway about 2 weeks ago, we got a message on Kangaroojack from Sharon, saying that she had been catching up with the blog and realised that we were living in Canberra and we should get together.
Well Sue Briggs said that she played squash with Sharon every week I said that I had sent Sharon an e-mail saying we would love to catch up.
Well just after my conversation with Sue, I spoke to Sharon and we agreed that we would all meet up on tonight at the Pide House in Woden, which is a Turkish restaurant, so we will tell you all about it in the next blog.
Saturday evening we had a brilliant evening with Bec and Rob & Sarah Hanily and their kids in Higgins. We decided to cook a Mexican meal and take it all over with us, when we met up a 6 o’clock and an evening of beer and Rummikub would follow.
Another brilliant evening went off, I don’t know where we put all that food and to top it off, Sarah and Bec presented Caroline with her birthday gifts and also made two beautiful birthday cakes.
Finally, we have some amazing news, last year we received 3 awards for our blog on Travelblog, which were for photography, for our writing and for our comments. Well yesterday we have been inducted in to the Travelblog hall of fame and are one of 105 bloggers who are in the hall of fame out of 200,000 bloggers on the site.
The travel blog has been going 9 years, and this year we are picked with 19 other bloggers, who have equally offered a significant contribution to the blog site. We could not have achieved this without our readers and of course the support of the Travelblog crew.
We were described as and I quote ‘Over two years exploring their adopted home of Australia - possibly Travelblog's most prolific bloggers!’
We are really pleased with this, in the early days we were blogging every day, as an electronic diary of our travels, where at the moment it is just a record of our new life.
This blog is number 590, we have been away from the UK for 947 days and have had just turning 90,000 hits on our blog site.
I would have thought we would have passed a million words but we have not quite got there.
Finally our friends Keith and Jan have set off on their travels and this week have heard that they have reached Longreach in Queensland. We hope they have a great trip and stay safe. We are out on the road with them in spirit!
Until next time.
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Jo Trouble
Jo McCarthy
Belated 'Happy Birthday' Caroline :-) 90,000 hits - amazing!