Home!

We arrive home on Friday 19 August as planned, one of our first tasks was to organise a play date for our girl and her boyfriend, Gus.  Saturday morning down at the park and it was true love!  They had not forgotten each other, a wonderful play, lots of tumbling, running and just having fun!  Sunday morning, another date, within 15 minutes, our baby was down!  A rush to the emergency Vet, and our true little St Kilda girl, needed a full knee reconstruction!  Monday morning off to our Vet, and with in the day she was on the operating table, with a stay over night on the Monday, she was back home!

We are supposedly to keep her still for 6 weeks and after that she is able to go on gentle lead walks!  This is very hard for our girl, as she does like to play!  Bonnie is very brave, has not cried once, no whimpering from her, however maybe from us as she bumps her leg as it gets in the way!

She has now got her bandages off, and on Friday she will have the stitches out.  Her leg looks very clean, swelling going down and the stitches are drying up nicely!  We have borrowed a crate from Elly and Clive, more Frenchie friends, so we are able to control her and slow her down!

It's been a busy week, nearly two weeks since we arrived home!  I am off to work on Thursday and have some teaching days in the next few weeks to look forward to!  We also have the September Birthday season to look forward to, lots of celebration ahead!

Wellington and beyond

After leaving Lightning Ridge, we needed to move fairly quickly to get back home and so many places along the way, we had to say, "next time"!  Wellington is one of these places, not only do I have a great great, maybe even another great grandfather buried in the cemetery, we haven't explored the Wellington caves or enjoyed the beautiful rolling hills and countryside of this area. This sculpture is placed at the entrance to the Wellington Caves and Caravan Park, we only had one night here, but next time we will stay longer.

This is an amazing sculpture made of mosaics, tin wind chimes and other bits and pieces.  The shapes are very organic and flow in weird and wonderful ways!

As we neared south, we started to face the cold weather and even faced rain!  Out came the gumboots and the raincoats, Bonnie even had to put on her St Kilda raincoat!

We arrived at Orbost on Thursday 18 August and our Orbost Caravan Park was basically flooded with all the rain!  Packing up and cleaning was a miserable time, there was no where to put things as we tried to strip down the van and make sure we remembered everything to take home!  Our beautiful clean van that we had been able to clean previously was covered in mud and we had to pull down the pop top when it was wet.  That will be a nice bit of mould to look forward to when we head off again!

Our drive home, thankfully was uneventful, we stopped off for a delicious morning tea at Stratford, our starting point for breakfast when we set out in June!

We arrived home to a beautiful clean house, lovely flowers and muffins prepared by our lovely house sitters, Hannah and Ky.

It is great to be home!

Lightning Ridge

What a visually, exciting town is Lightning Ridge.  We stayed 3 days, but could have stayed a lot longer!  We found a new caravan park that had only been opened since Easter and this was the view from our van!  It was in walking distance to the artesian bore, so once again there was lots of floating around in the water.  However, this water was a little too hot so we didn't spend too long there!

We followed the Car Door tour around the town, maps and description set out by the tourist information centre!  We would have liked to do the official tour around town but it would have taken too long and we would have had to leave our baby!  This is the only time we have had to rethink our travels, she has been such a good little traveller and companion!

We did get to visit the cactus gardens, amazing!  Bonnie was allowed to come, but the lovely owner of the park suggested that it may be more treacherous for her, than the cacti!

She stayed in the car, and I was able to play with the new Iphone to capture these arty shots of the cacti!

We left Lightning Ridge and headed for Wellington.  A 400km day, we have decided that is a good mileage to do, especially with this being the holiday of mishaps!  My turn to drive, it seems to happen when I am at the wheel, a large road train, and our caravan mirror just disappeared from the car after a rather loud bang!  We were lucky, no damage to the car, it must have hit the van as a cupboard had been flung open.  At least it wasn't as messy as the drippy peach tins, but I did have the contents of a cupboard on the floor, including a jar of Vegemite which didn't break!

The weather has started to get cooler, the long pants will be on soon and we will have to farewell our shorts and T-Shirts!

On the road!

After a stop at Crow's Nest, again, to get ourselves back on the road and ready for our travel homeward bound, and with a few delays on the way it didn't take us too long to get back into travel mode!   A stop at a "fisho", for a kilo of prawns, our first night's dinner on the road at Mitchell.  We had stayed here before in the year 2000, and with fond memories of the artesian spa pool we made a return visit!  Staying 3 nights, with the luxury of an en suite, we filled in our census form, and did enjoy the relaxing float around the spa.  Each morning we wandered up the street, chatting to the locals and lapping up the sunshine!

A hard day in the sun for the baby!

Our hideaway, with en suite close by and a nice shaded site to escape the full sun!

Next stop, St George, a new experience for us, what a beautiful town, situated on a massive river, if fact it is known as the great inland fishing centre!  We spent 2 nights here, in an old caravan park with the cleanest toilet/bathroom block we had seen!  Many people in the park had chosen St George as their winter escape so there was quite a few caravaners in for the haul!

A tasting stop and a little spot of lunch at Riversands Winery.  We bought some muscat, but haven't opened it yet - it would be a good Cape Conran drop!

On the road again, through Dirranbandi, a tiny town close to the Queensland border, beautiful old pub and and lots of charm!

A sign for our Sophie, (Niece) who loves her rabbits!

Hebel, what a grand pub on the border, just a little too early to settle in for a beer!

We finally leave God's country and hit NSW!

Farewell to family and southward bound!

The time has come, we have to pack up and head south, leaving our beautiful family and our home away from home!  A family reunion of the Grant's, a great day spent at Ben and Natalie's catching up with everyone.  Ross' sister and brother live in Queensland and his other sister, Sue from Melbourne who is up on holidays with her husband Barry made up the clan with John's beautiful daughters and family joining us.

A delicious snack of "cheerios" for Paige, we call them little boys, but this was a particularly big one!

A bath for the sea monster, thought she needed to have a scrub with the close confines of the caravan to look forward to!

Final breakfast with our beautiful grand daughters

Farewell to Nat and the girls

The night after at John and Sheryl's after solving the problems of the world!

Farewell to John and Sheryl, hopefully we will meet up with them next year on the road as they have just purchased a lovely caravan!

We are now on the road, planning to take 2 weeks to return home.  Will enjoy the warmth of Queensland as long as we can before hitting the depths of cold weather in Melbourne.