Australia

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We had preordered a breakfast through room service the night before. It seemed like a good idea to eat before leaving to pick up the van, so that when we did our first food shop we wouldn’t go into the supermarket starving and spend a fortune. We’d carefully picked a filling but cheap breakfast of eggs on toast from the menu. When it arrived we took the lids of the plates to reveal a massive full fry up with hash browns, bacon, sausages, tomatoes toast and eggs! The receipt said we’d only paid for the eggs and toast at around £4, but instead they’d given us a feast!

It was the first proper fry up we’d had since leaving the UK ( NZ just didn’t seem to have good bacon or sausages) and it was great.

We left the hotel in a taxi feeling rather full but very happy.

The Britz hire shop was huge and there were lots of other couples waiting around at different desks. After filling out some forms we were given a DVD to watch showing how to work the van (not that we needed to watch it as travelling around NZ turned us into pros!) There was a debate about whether to buy a road map at £8 or hire sat nav for £35. After seeing how vague the map looked we decided to give sat nav a go.

A couple of hours after arriving at the depot we were finally in our 2 berth van ready to go. It was much newer than our 4 berth NZ van, but felt a lot smaller.

There were no supermarkets anywhere nearby so we decided to head towards the Blue Mountains and try to pick up food there. Immediately we were so pleased to have sat nav. Sydney is hectic and driving at close to rush hour in the city with a poor road map wouldn’t have been very easy. I think sat nav might just have saved our marriage as Matt doesn’t do well under pressure and we could easily have ended up killing each other without it.

An hour we arrived at the entrance to the Blue Mountains. We called in at the Visitors Centre to collect some information about campsites and supermarkets, and then carried on our journey. Time was getting on when we arrived at the supermarket so we tried our best to do a full shop as quickly as we could. It still took us a good hour and a half to make our way around. The bill was pretty good considering we’d bought ourselves lots of luxury nibbles to enjoy with our various wines - at home it would all have cost us much more.

We pulled into the campsite at about 7pm, relieved that we’d got the day over with and finally had a van that was stocked to the brim with food and drink. We spent the evening unpacking (and complaining that the van was much smaller than our old one), then eating a lovely big roast chicken salad and wine.

Through the night we heard the rain coming down. This time we were in a van that didn’t leak.

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