Coming "home"

The day after our son's wedding we farewelled our two younger sons as they flew back to Brisbane and then worshipped with my parents and two close friends at the church of our son and new daughter-in-law. They, of course, weren't there. 

We briefly farewelled my parents after church. When I say bye to someone I often mentioned something about when I'll see them again; this time we were able to say: see you later this year. Our plan is to visit for a short time in south-east Queensland during July. Mum asked if we had dates and I laughed. Despite the blog post I'd shared the week before about looking forward to 2025, we'd barely thought beyond that weekend!

Home, with a new tablecloth!

Then had lunch with our friends and farewelled them. I wasn't ready for the farewells, but they happened anyway. We then gathered our stuff and left town, heading four hours north to Cairns. Australia is a huge place with long spaces inbetween many places (Tasmania being the exception to that). If you've been to our native land and haven't figured that out, then you haven't seen much of it! It was a tiring journey, but we listened to radio commentary of the Aussie women playing cricket against England. We cruised into a very quiet looking Cairns around dinner time, watched more cricket as we wound down in the evening, and crashed on the bed.

The next morning we were moving again: to the airport and back to a chilly Tokyo. The trickiest part was always going to be getting back home from the airport when we were so tired. We'd parked in long-term parking and once again cricket on the (internet) radio helped us on our journey! (Yes, we're cricket-mad, and not ashamed at all.) 

The most immediate culture shock we had was figuring out what speed to drive! Yep, we've driven for nearly 25 years in Japan and in 13 days forgot that most driving is slower in Japan than in Australia. Quickly sorted that and we were home in 1 ½ hours by about 8 pm. It felt odd, but also good to walk back into our apartment. It's at the same time still new-to-us and very home-like. We moved around like we were in a dream, reminding ourselves that the most urgent thing was being prepared for David to leave before 8 am the next morning (Tuesday) for work, and getting some sleep.

Some Christmas presents from our
sons that we received before
the wedding.

I predicted that it would take several days to get back into the groove, and that is exactly what happened. By Saturday we were exhausted and very thankful for a quiet day with nothing at all on the schedule.

Now those 13 days in Australia seem like a dream, except that every now and then there are reminders from our time there: like photos, messages from our new daughter-in-law, and things that we brought back with us. As usual, things have moved on in our absence, so it has been a delight to have a few friends here demanding to see photos from our time away!

So, we're going through the motions, but sometimes my thoughts and soul are still catching up with where my physical body is. It remains true that the last 12 months have contained much change for us, and I think I'm still finding my feet in this new phase of life. Please pray that I'll be patient with myself and people around me as I walk through this.

Day 53: day in Melbourne

On our whole day in Melbourne we walked a couple of kilometres to the train. We ended up walking nearly nine kilometres this day. We actually did a lot of walking during April, during the month we walked an average of 4.4 kilometres a day, a couple of kilometres more than we usually walk, so walking a couple of ks to the train wasn't a big deal.

We've only been to Melbourne a few times in our lives. One of those times was during our honeymoon, where we also visited the MCG and Australian Sports Museum. I like to joke that I nearly lost David there last time! There's a tonne of information and if you're interested in sport and history you can easily spend hours there.

We left the caravan park early, leaving plenty of time for things to go wrong, but nothing did, so we ended up getting to the stadium way too early for the tour we were booked on. So we took a walk through the local area. Wikipedia says this about the area: 

It is considered to be Australia's "premier sports precinct" and regularly hosts some of the biggest domestic and international sporting events, including the AFL Grand Final (Australian rules football), Australian Open (tennis), and the Boxing Day Test (cricket). The venues have also previously hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

Rowing on the Yarra

It's clearly also an entertainment location. Taylor Swift performed at the MCG three times in February, each were sell-outs (96,000 people). The day we were there we saw lines of people (mostly young women) who had obviously spent part or all of the night waiting in line to get into a concert at another venue in the precinct. A security staff member told us it was a concert by former member of One Direction, Niall Horan.

Victorians love their sport and this precinct
is well equipped to handle tens of thousands
of people. There are several large train
stations nearby, not to mention trams.

We walked as far as the Yarra River and discovered another sporting event underway. It was a university rowing regatta.

We've watched cricket matches at the MCG many times in our lives. It was great to see it again in person, though it was all set up for AFL matches (they had three on that weekend, one each night).

The commentators have an amazing view (obviously).

This is an amazing tapestry made to celebrate the
150th anniversary of the MCG in 2003. It's
seven metres long and two metres high. Absolutely
stunning in its detail.

This is the distinctive suit Cathy wore
when she won the 400 m gold 
in Sydney.

After a 45 min tour of the stadium we gave ourselves over to exploring the huge Australian Sports Museum. It was wonderful. I discovered exhibits about Cathy Freeman, an Australian athlete who won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the 400 m. She's in the Australia Sport Hall of Fame. I've got a story about her that I don't think I've shared here—it's not exactly relevant to my everyday life. (This is my memory, I'm not sure how accurate it is.) She is practically the same age as me and in our last three years of high school we were attending schools in the same town. I was a little bit of an athlete at the time and represented our school in the 4x100 m. We ran in the same race for our schools, though I'm almost certain we weren't in the same leg. I wasn't the fastest at our school, so I think I was running second or third leg of the relay and she would have been their last runner. We had the Australian Junior Long Jump Champion in our team (my friend) who I'm pretty sure ran our last leg. I don't know which school won...it would be nice to think we did, but I suspect that Cathy outran everyone. She won gold and silver at the Commonwealth and Olympic Games in the next few years after all. Anyway, it's a fun story and I even got to tell it to one or two of the staff at the museum!

We decided to head home when we still had a little bit of energy to walk to the train and from the train to the caravan park. It was a fun day that we're glad we took the time do. Cricket, especially, is a shared interest of ours that we love to indulge in together. I think it's important to invest in these shared interests, especially as our years of investing daily in our boys are over ("daily" being the key word here, we're still part of their lives, just not so intensely).

The next day we really got going on our journey home. Over the next five days we drove about 1,600 km to get home, stopping along the way to take in a few sights. I'm going to condense those days into just three posts, so as not to prolong the end of this journey too much!

Day 8: Sydney to Bowral

Parked at Bradman Oval

This day (Wednesday, 20th) we left Sydney—but not before a walk with our host and extracting our motorhome from her backyard via a narrow driveway.

Cricket fans: look closely at these field
placements! This is a mural at the museum.

Before leaving the city we drove to Castle Hill to catch up with an old friend of David’s from uni days. We met him in a historical park called Castle Hill Heritage Park Reserve. We discovered it was the site of a very early government farm the fed the colony. It was established in 1801, only a dozen years after the first white settlers arrived in the country. This was also the site of a convict uprising a couple of years later. "The Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 was Australia’s first uprising. The rebellion was an attempt by a group of Irish convicts to overthrow British rule in New South Wales and return to Ireland where they could continue to fight for an Irish republic" (from here). Also close by was Australia’s first official institute for people with mental illness, from 1811 to 1826. 

Cricket gnomes

Then we drove towards Canberra, our nation’s capital. But we made a planned stop at a small town that is the birthplace of a famous Australian: Donald Bradman. He’s been called the greatest batsman of all time (that's across all countries). In a game that loves statistics, he’s head and shoulders above the rest, and with a career batting average of 99.94, His career batting average is almost 39 runs higher than the next batsman who has scored more than 2,000 runs.

Our goal was to visit the cricket museum bearing his name. We spent two very enjoyable hours there reading all sorts of things about this game we love. We revelled in taking our time in a way that one can't when one has offspring to also take care of...

After we were done (not long before closing time), we took our time having afternoon tea in the motorhome and then drove 10 minutes down the road to set up at a caravan park, in a town with a great name: Mittagong.

We enjoyed lovely showers and WiFi, along with the sound of trains through the night (though they were across the other side of the road, about 100m away). We're gradually getting used to where everything is in the motorhome, as well as all the little routines that come with a life on the road.