Day 9: Mittagong to Canberra

Our first long-drop loo on this journey.

Today (21 March) was another big day. We drove from Mittagong to Canberra, which is only two hours.

 In the north of Canberra we met a couple for lunch who have prayed for us and encouraged us along our cross-cultural ministry journey for a long time (and not forgetting his first wife, who passed away from cancer early in our journey, she too was an encouragement to us). They are in their late 80s and early 90s now and still passionate about mission (they both served in PNG in Bible translation).

Roadside stop on our journey.

We spent most of the afternoon with them before heading to the next place to park our home-on-wheels. 

It turned into a not-so-fun-Google adventure. Google Maps doesn’t include a setting to exclude routes (and car parks) that have height limitations, so we ran into difficulty. This motorhome is 3.25m high and we got stuck at the entrance to three car parks and had to do awkward manoeuvres to avoid damage, including driving over a traffic island inside the car park. Me, the navigator, was very tired by this point, having not slept well and experiencing a few points of physical pain, had trouble and David, the driver, had his own difficulties! We were glad to finally find a grocery store that had the half-dozen items we wanted and no height restriction in the car park.

Our next point of lodging came courtesy of personal connections from our uni years. We’re parked on the property of St John the Baptist Anglican Church, a church that predates the city of Canberra. We know the Rector and they’ve kindly allowed us to park here for a few days. It's an amazing location, almost in the centre of Canberra. So now we can say that we've "camped" in Canberra, Sydney, and Tokyo!