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Published: January 5th 2010
Our patrol
With the new Snorkel FittedDAY 423
Not a great nights sleep as I keep waking up coughing in the night, I thought that I had got over the cold I picked up before Christmas, but it is still hanging around in a different guise.
Andy brings me a cup of tea, it is 6.45, he is already showered, I get up and get ready, strip the bed linen off to put it in the washing machine, a little bit of breakfast and by 7.30 we are heading into Wagga.
We need to be in Wagga by 8.30 to deliver the Patrol to All Things Off Road, they are fitting a snorkel today, this should be the final piece of work that we needed done over the Christmas break. If you were reading the blog for the Cape York part of our journey you may remember that we backed out of a river crossing (Canal Creek, I think) we backed out as the nose of the Patrol was going in too low and as we did not have a snorkel we stood a fair risk of getting water in the air filter. Well with a snorkel fitted it would solve that problem
The Patrol
53,000 K's around Australia, why fit a Snorkel now!! which means when we come across a river crossing that is on the high side then we should be ok to cross, following the usual recommendations of how to cross safely.
With the Patrol dropped off we headed to Bunnings, wow, I know we are in for a really exciting morning, but they do have a little café there, so the plan was to go and sit and have a coffee, then wander around to get the things that we have on our list, we have stuff to get for Woodstock and a few bits for ourselves.
We sit in the coffee shop with a full fat latte, I did ask for skinny latte but they told me they had no skinny milk, so we sat down and worked out today’s plan of attack, we have a lot to do in Wagga. We have another latte, and have a chat about our future plans, we have a few ideas about what we should do and where we should go next, of course it depends if work comes up or not, but in the meantime we do need to plan and while we have time on our hands then
we should still explore some of the areas that we have not been too as yet, which could include parts of Victoria that we missed last year due to the fires.
We finish our coffee and then wander around Bunnings, in the meantime we chuckle as every time we look at our phone Helen has sent us a text message to add something to the shopping list.
We had a good wander around, pick up everything we need and then head to the check out, we explain at the checkout that we spoke to Emily in Customer Services earlier that we can pay and then we can leave our trolley of goods to collect a little later as soon as we have transport, they were happy to do this for us. We received a text message from Helen telling us that All Things Off Road want to talk to us about the air filter. I expect I know what they want to talk to us about, which was confirmed when we wandered back over the road, they see that it is quite full of dust and want to put a new one in, however Andy explained that it
is a K&N filter, these are guaranteed for a million kilometres and only “Supposedly” need to be cleaned every 50,000 K’s Never mind I think they were hoping to make a little extra from us today, to no avail.
We went and sat in the shop, they have a comfy seating area with a pile of magazines, so we got comfy and waited another hour and a half. Originally they told us it would only be 2 hours, but we actually waited for 4 hours, we would have gone into the town centre but it was too far to walk.
Then the time came, our Patrol was parked outside looking every bit the professional off roader, we check out how it has all gone together and we are both very pleased with the conversion.
As soon as we were mobile again, we headed back to Bunnings to pick up our shopping, then we headed over to the Co-Op to pick up some dog nuts for the dogs at Woodstock then over to South West Stock Feeds to pick up some chicken food for Jason, unfortunately they were out of the type that Jason wanted so we could not get any for him and then we forgot to pick up a block of sawdust that Helen wanted.
We headed into town and had some lunch, a late lunch by now, went to Medisure to claim back fees for Andy’s specialist visit and then we popped down to the Telstra shop.
By now we have decided to ditch the very poor Vodafone service and go with Telstra, as we are now starting to think seriously about work, I know we have been saying that for months, but honestly we will get round to the work thing again sometime soon, we want to be sure that we are better contactable and the only way to do that is to get onto the Telstra 3G network, so we just purchased a pre paid Telstra telephone with a blue tick, the blue tick means the telephone is capable of rural coverage.
Time is ticking on, I am still not feeling too well, and cannot wait to have a rest, but we need to head into Woolworths to pick up the groceries for tonights dinner. Susan is cooking Beer Chicken and will be waiting on the chicken, plus all the other bits and pieces that Helen has text to us throughout the day.
We queue for ages in Woolworths and there are very few checkouts open, the queue behind us bends around the aisles. At the checkout I ask the girl if she knows where Sams Warehouse is, but she doesn’t, “no problem” I said, but then all of a sudden she asks someone in the queue and then half the queue are involved in giving me directions. Never mind we know where we are going now. But then I try to pay for the shopping and my card is declined which is some surprise to me and I find out that my visa debit card has a daily spending limit and as I used it this morning to pay for the snorkel I have obviously exceeded that, so I ended up having to use my British bank account to pay for the shopping which is most annoying!
This causes another problem, we need diesel, but if I have expired my daily spending limit then we are stuck, we have enough to get back to Woodstock but we won’t have enough to go anywhere else. I suggested to Andy that we put $50 in the tank then I can pay cash, this will be plenty until we come back into Wagga.
Then we head to Sams Warehouse to pick up some dog bowls for Jason, though they are not for dog food, they are for chicken food! I manage to squeeze this small amount onto my Visa Debit card, and we hot foot it back to Woodstock.
By now it is 6.00 we have been out since 7.30 this morning, as soon as we are back in through the door, Susan takes the chickens and gets them prepared for the oven, the beer cans are very carefully placed up their backsides and stood up in the roasting dish, soon cooking away.
I sit down with a cup of tea and quickly type the blog up for yesterday, Susan and Helen busy themselves with final preparations for dinner and Andy goes off to feed the dogs. We are both tired from running around all day. While I type Happy Hour starts with Susan pouring the wine. This will be Susan’s last day of non sobriety as she heads back to Canberra tomorrow ready to go back to work on Thursday, I think this will mark the Christmas period well and truly over with everyone getting back to normal, except for me and Andy what is normal?
Michelle, Peter and Adam, Helen and Roberts next door neighbours (still over 1 kilometre away) arrived for dinner, we all sat and chatted, looking at photographs, especially of the cakes that Michelle makes and decorates, they are beautiful and many are so intricately done with sprays of flowers made out of icing sugar.
When Jason arrives, he brings a bucket full of eggs and tells us that he is slightly late as he found a brown snake in and around the chicken pens that needed dealing with.
We sit down and tuck into a fabulous meal and amazingly the chicken does not taste like beer, it is full of flavour the meat is very moist and so tender it almost melts in the mouth. Followed by one of Helens great desserts, sticky date pudding. I think all this eating is going to have to stop, I will be putting weight on again as I am not exercising enough at the moment.
The flies are starting to swarm again tonight, as we are sitting outside we can see them all and have to adjust the lighting so that we don’t get covered in them, by the time we go indoors they roof of the veranda is covered. It looks like we will be in for a bout of heavy rain, again this will be appreciated, the more rain they get now, means that the manual feeding of the lambs can be further delayed as there will be plenty of green grass and Lucerne in the paddocks for them to eat.
I flagged fairly early on in the evening but have managed to keep going, it is now nearly midnight and everyone is ready for their bed.
It is quiet outside, not a single dog is barking so we soon drift of into slumber.
Until another exciting day tomorrow folks!
Goodnight
KJ
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Darryl and Sarah
Wallaby Wanderers
Told you snorkelling is great
....oh, different sort of snorkelling! There'll be absolutely no stopping you now and there was nothing much stopping you before! I'll look out for a small pair of flippers for your UHF aerial then you'll be set!! lots of love and safe snorkelling! WW x x x