After spending a jolly Christmas and a Happy New Year in Adelaide, we wanted to go and spend some time with our pals in Traralgon over the summer holidays. It was just to be a short visit for a little over a week and then we'd be heading back to Adelaide. It also meant that we'd be "completing the loop" which we started a year last April, 21 months ago. Woopppeee!!
It's nearly 900km so we took 2 days in getting there. We started packing up at 7am, but it took ages. The photo on the right is a big branch that fell down - gum trees have a habit of shedding branches when ever they're in the mood. This branch has been moved from where it fell - the spot where our car is parked! Fortunately we were out at the time...otherwide it would have done some serious damage to the car.
We departed at 10:15am (tut tut) on Tuesday 12th January and we stopped at a rest area just over the border in Victoria. We blinked and we missed the border! (The border is the dashed vertical line on the map at the top).There was a sign saying "Welcome to Victoria" (I checked on the return journey). We stayed overnight at a rest area near Horsham (below) - it took well over an hour to find a space to park the caravan - it was so crowded!
Maybe not. Just 420km to go and we'd be back at the start of our journey! We headed off, stopped off for a couple of breaks, came through the very busy Melbourne. The Melbourne skyline is much broader than Adelaide, but it does have 3 times the population (3.8 million compared with the 1.2 million of Adelaide).
Before getting into Traralgon, we stopped for lunch at Yarragon which is a picturesque little place. We stopped here 5 years earlier on our way from Melbourne airport to Traralgon for when we had just emigrated.
From there it was just 40 minutes back to Traralgon. We retold tales of events as we approached there, getting more excited by the minute. Until...Yes ! We made it!!
Our house is on a cul-de-sac, called Ryeburn Close, here we are heading up there! It was a great feeling!! We did it !!! 21 months later and several thousand kilometers and we're back!!
We'd stashed all our furniture, records, books, bikes, in the shed, so after checking with the tenants who are renting the house, we had a look to see if was all still there...look under the cobwebs and I think you'll find it.
Yeeehaaaa!! We spent the rest of the week catching up with friends, lots of good barbeques, heaps and heaps of laughs.
(Did I mention that we had to move all the above into a lock-up??!! Arrggh!! That'll teach us not to hang on to so much junk!). But by half past five on the Saturday, with the help of friends and trailers, we'd moved it into the lock-up ("secure storage unit" as the real estate folks call it). It was a great week.
