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| A beautiful view from our balcony at Pauline and Grahams home in Whale Beach!! |
| Glenn's Journal 01-26-03 & 01-27-03 Melbourne/Sydney Sunday morning and the weather has cooled off from a high yesterday of 44 C down into the 20's today. We are packing this morning as we quickly realiz that we have way too much stuff. We have our backpacks and day packs, but we also have two boxes that are ready to be mailed home and two coolers that are full of items that we are not ready to mail home (including 18 paperback books of which only 6 have been read by both of us). We must think we are going to have plenty of time to read coming in the near future. Of course the beaches of Fiji and Bali should provide for some of this. Anyway, after spending the morning packing and organizing we decided to head out to the mall. Erin needed to feel more like a women so she wanted to go clothes shopping for sundresses and more "girly" clothes. After lunch Erin said she needed two hours to shop by herself so we agreed to meet back in two hours. I wandered around the mall stopping into stores of interest but mostly window shopping. I ran into Erin at 4:00 pm (1 1/2 hours into the 2 hours requested) and she was trying dresses on. We agreed to meet in a half hour at a dress shop that she had put some clothes on hold. We met back up at 4:30 pm but this time she had a bag full of new clothes. More importantly she had a big smile on her face and was very happy about her shopping day. We returned home for our last meal with the Anderson's, who have been wonderful hosts to us during our stay. The rest of the evening was spent chatting about our next plans and other events around the world. The big news in Melbourne was all of the fires in New South Wales and Victoria right now. They had damaged homes and destroyed much wilderness throughout the region. Off to bed early as we have a long drive tomorrow to Sydney. 01-27-03 Sydney We did the final packing and loaded the car before saying our goodbye's to the Anderson's. We took off around 9:15 am and we knew that we had at least a 9 hour drive ahead of us. Melbourne to Sydney along the Hume highway is listed at 880 kilometers and is the quickest way to get there. The drive was long and pretty uneventful and the scenery was mostly very dry plains and hills. Most of the regions around here are currently on water restrictions and extreme fire warnings so it is very dry out here right now. The only problem we had was with the car. We had stopped for gas about an hour and a half outside Sydney and after filling the tank and paying we could not get the car to start. I went through a mental checklist and after verifying the battery and fuses determined it to be a problem with the starter. A gentleman came to our rescue and reminded me how to start the car by jumping the starter solenoid to the starter with a piece of metal. The car started right up and on our way we were. We would need to repair the problem tomorrow before we did to many other things. Once in town we stopped (but did not turn off the car) and called our friends Pauline and Graham, who live in Whale Beach just north of Sydney. We had been communicating with them via e-mail for some time and they knew we would be in town tonight. They invited us to stay with them and we definitely took them up on the offer. We arrived at their house just before 9:00 pm which included a stop to get takeaway chinese from a restaurant just down the road from their place. We spent the rest of the evening chatting with Pauline and Graham before retiring around 11:00 pm. |
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| The Lorikeets joined us for breakfast every morning (more like our 6:00 am wake up call) on the balcony at the Williams home. |