The story so far

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Back by popular demand, or because a couple of people asked me too, I am again writing a blog for this holiday. I will start with a quick update for anybody just joining, and for those who were following, because it is a long time between posts.

For varying periods of time, we take on the life of grey nomads. In reality, we have a caravanning holiday, but the nomad title sounds good. Also, we aren’t grey. Frank is. However, I have brown hair with golden highlights. Who knows what colour my hair is in reality. Moving on, we are traveling in our home built 5^th wheeler, which every trip brings us much pleasure and always an element of frustration. Last year, we travelled with our two dogs, Sally and Bubble. Bubble was diagnosed with a tumour in her mouth last year in Queensland, and is no longer with us. Sally is travelling with us this year. We think she has dementia and is vision and hearing impaired. We also think she is neurotic and suffers from separation anxiety. As a result, we have a weird dog who doesn’t come back when she is called and can’t negotiate the steps in poor light. I have digressed. After our first trip in the van, we added improvements such as dedicated crockery (melamime) cupboard and ducted vacuum. Last year we broke a spring on our van, so it now has a new set of springs and has a lovely foldaway step. I can now get in and out the van without having to hold on to the hand rail. Exciting. Update over.

This trip is only going to be a short one, around three weeks. Frank is saving up leave so that we can have a longer one next year. Thursday saw us up early for the start of our trip. In usually Sady style, we were nowhere near ready to go and didn’t set out until 1230, a ridiculous time to start a trip. Our first night was at Nhill. We weren’t expecting anything flash, but were pleasantly surprised. Nice clean park with a feature I have never seen before. Heaters in the showers. I kid you not. Each shower stall had one of those globe heaters (tastic) above it. So I pushed the big white button to switch on the power as I entered the amenities block, the heaters came on. I got undressed, turned on the water, got under the shower and ….. the timer ran out and the heater turned of. Great. It was a great idea though. Another discovery at Nhill. In the twelve month or so that we hadn’t used the van, it was taken over by squatters. It seems a colony of bush roaches had moved in and are enjoying our comforts. We are disposing of them as they appear. After this trip, the van will get a good going over with surface spray.

On Friday we continued our travels and spent the night at Port Wakefield, north west of Adelaide. We decided that after a long days driving, the cook would have the night off and we dined at the Port Wakefield Hotel. If you are ever passing through, I recommend it for a meal. $12.00 for soup, main with salad bar. Sally waited for us in the van. OMG. The noise she was making while we were gone was horrendous. She was howling like a banshee. Now we have to decide if we should pack her in box and send her home by express post (except there is nobody there to collect the parcel), or use her as bait in a bid to catch a white pointer. The alternative of course, is to take her wherever we go. I hope she doesn’t get sea sick.

The last leg of our journey brought us to Venus Bay on the Eyre Peninsula via getting lost in Port Augusta. Seriously. We accidently found ourselves in the grounds of the Port Augusta Hospital, because the road signage doesn’t inform travellers that it is a no through road. I didn’t realise Venus Bay was 1250 km from home, because the last time we were here and fell in love with the place, we came from the west and were on our way home. We have a great site with absolute beach frontage. Hopefully we will get to enjoy it when this gale blows over in the next day or two. In the meantime, staying indoors gives me the opportunity to finish an essay that is due tomorrow.

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