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Published: July 13th 2009
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Beautiful Sight
Poor guy carried it 400 miles from Cairns and had to take Sally back the same night. Good news for all of you losing sleep over our predicament in Croydon. Our new RV did arrive, later in the day than we expected but at least it was on the day we expected. Kudos to Apollo RV rental. Sally was a Ford and the new one was a Volkwagen but, that aside, they were identical. We had discussions on the name and never really came to a conclusion. There was a faction wanting to call it Little John and another lobbying for Herbie, after the VW Love Bug. Neither really stuck and we just kind of settled on “The Van” by default. So, we were able to leave Croydon and withdrew the kid’s employment applications at the Club Pub so they will not have to spend their teen years washing dishes there.
From Croydon we continued through “the bush” into “the outback”. Our impression of the outback is interesting isolation with lots of nothing except a lone roadhouse/gas station/pub every 150 miles. We’ve had our share of being stranded by the side of the road so we just smiled and filled our tank with their very expensive fuel. The roads are straight with little to hit if one
should run off the road and with very little traffic so we decided to let the kids lounge in the beds during the long days of driving instead of being strapped in with seat belts and all. This had Wayne very aware of his driving but also confirmed that his decision years ago to give up on trying to understand females was wise. Ellen initially refused to let any of the kids sit in the front passenger seat of the new RV because it had a passenger side airbag but she was accepting of letting them lie in bed all day eating snacks while we drove.
Australia played a pretty big role in WW II and had many bases and airfields built up through the center of the country. They are all ruins now but some are marked with a small sign saying “WW II Airfield”. The signs only point in the general direction of the airfield but give no information as to how far away it is. Countless times Wayne took great pleasure in suddenly veering Little John/Herbie down narrow dirt tracks in search of some lost airfield telling Ellen “We’ll only go 5 more miles” while the
washboards made the dishes and everybody’s teeth rattle. Sometimes the track would actually end up at a partly overgrown runway so Ellen and the kids would pick up their books while Wayne abandoned them to go running off gleefully into the brush searching for a fragment of building foundation or a small metal piece that may have once been part of a Hudson or B-24 bomber.
As we got further north and closer to the coast we began to see things other than brush. Things like water were welcome and the chance to swim again was very welcome even if many of the swim areas are home to crocodiles in the wet season. Fortunately, this is the dry season and we were assured there are no crocodiles in the dry season. We did find it odd that the guy who told us this was adamant that we go into the water first.
So, we’ve arrived in Darwin, 4,674 miles from Sydney (the map says the direct route is about 2,000 miles but it seems we wandered a bit), turned the RV in yesterday and have been exploring Darwin since. The company gave us credit for the days we
Kids Playing Yahtzee
Alternate title: Kids being good were stranded but then tried to hit us up with a $125 cleaning fee for not having dumped out the poop tank on Sally before they took her back to Cairns. We pointed out that the only place we could have dumped it was in the road and to please clarify if the RV rental company advocates their clients dumping poop tanks on the road - they removed the $125 fee. Dumping the poop tank wasn’t Wayne’s favorite task but it certainly wasn’t that bad and he’s considering coming back to Australia at the end of our trip to set up a stand outside the RV rental place offering to dump poop tanks for $90 for forgetful renters.
Australia has been great and we give it 5 thumbs up but, alas, it is time to move on to phase 2 of our journey. Tomorrow we leave Australia to head further north to Singapore for a few days of stuffing our faces before going further north to Siam. A guy just looked over my shoulder and pointed out that Siam is now known as Thailand. I guess our guidebook is a little out of date.
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Cynthia
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Awesome pictures! That is the best part of the whole blog. And Wayne....it does make sense!