The start of a long road trip

Warning: this blog is temporarily turning into a travel blog! Hang tight and we’ll return to normal programming in a couple of months. Meanwhile it’ll be this Aussie who sometimes feels like a visitor in Australia, travelling in her wide land to see what she can see.

I'm publishing posts with a few days delay so that you'll see our journey, but not know where we are at present (generally).

Monday and Tuesday

We got off to a rocky start to our motor home trip. Key to the whole adventure was borrowing my parent’s small motor home, but to do that we needed to fetch it from their place, about 1 ½ hrs from us. Our plan was to do that on Monday and bring it to Ipswich to our house so we could leisurely put our stuff in it on Tuesday. But David felt very weary on Sunday and woke up late on Monday wondering if he was ill with something. So we postponed our motorhome-fetching trip and instead spent a few hours getting a medical opinion and tests. Then resting. Thankfully nothing came of any of that and by the end of Monday he was feeling better. 

My parents kindly offered to meet us halfway on Tuesday, so we met them for lunch and picked up the motor home, packing our stuff into it in the afternoon.

Wednesday

I didn’t sleep well on Tuesday night. Nerves? Excitement? Both? This big audacious plan has been percolating for well over a year. We’ve known for several years that we could take long service leave during this home assignment, and this time last year a plan started to form about what we might actually do with this lengthy time off. So, after thinking about it for that long, it felt like a lot was riding on “getting it right”. And, of course, I’m always concerned that I’ll forget something vital. Going away for eight weeks is a considerable length of time…

We finally got away a bit before 10am, stopped close by to do a couple of last minute errands and realised I’d not packed my hat, so returned for that vital piece of equipment.

The first part of our journey is to Sydney to attend an OMF conference on the weekend, but we took our time about it. The first leg was Ipswich to Uralla, 463 km.

Uralla is a small town of less than 3,000 people. We stayed at their showgrounds. There were only a handful of others doing the same and we were thoughtfully placed a long way apart. 

It was a tiring day and I was grateful to be carrying leftovers from earlier in the week that we could just heat up and eat. But we did pull out the Scrabble board and complete a portion of a game and I got started with this travel blog. You're going to have to be patient with me, though, as I figure out how to balance this travel and writing!