 |
| This young koala was in a tree on the side of the road, along with his mom and dad |
| Glenn's Journals 12-02-02 & 12-03-02 South Australia Monday morning and Erin and I are focused on our main chores this week. My main chore is to buy a car for the remainer of our trip in Australia. Erin will work on the website, which we are sadly 6 weeks behind on. We will also work together on our plans for our wedding and the trip to the islands. We also need to book our trip to Kangaroo Island (since it is only by ferry) and to Tasmania (as it is less expensive by ferry as well). After breakfast we got started. I took the tram into Adelaide, more specifically Victoria Square (the center of town) where the rental car company would come pick me up. I rented a car for a few days so I could drive around looking for a car to buy. I spent the rest of the day driving from used car lot to used car lot only to be discouraged by the price of old used cars. It did help me to become familiar with the models of cars sold in Australia. Of course, like the states, there are basically the same cars but with many different names. Holden and Ford are very common but Toyota, Honda, Saab, and BMW are here as well. I returned home late in the afternoon. Erin had accomplished quite a lot with the website today. Julie, our host, prepared spaghetti for dinner and we enjoyed that while sharing stories about our travels. Julie spent five years traveling around the world including Algeria for 3 years. The stories were very interesting!! G120302 Tuesday was more of the same except Erin joined me. We spent the morning working on the internet looking up information about Kangaroo Island, Tasmania, and Fiji before heading out for the day. We had called on a few ads from the paper and had scheduled to see some cars today. Our first car of the day was a 1986 Toyota Corolla (asking $1700 Aus) as quite a few reliable people had recommended them as reliable cars. The first car had 278,000 kilometers on it and was leaking antifreeze so we passed on it. The second car of the day was also a 1986 Toyota Corolla (asking $3700 Aus) but only had 100,000 kilometers on it, was owned by a wonderfully "young at heart" couple in their 80's (Geoff and Fran Low), and was well maintained. This car was nice but more than we wanted to spend, if possible. We had targeted $3000 Aus and were a little limited by the fact that we required an automatic, since Erin is not comfortable with a stick. We chatted with the Low's for a while and told them our story. Upon leaving Fran provided us with a gift wrapped in Christmas paper in congratulations of our engagement. We were very pleasantly surprised. We said many thanks and headed on. We told the Low's that we would call back by 8:00 pm tonight if we were still interested but that we had a few more cars to see today. Off we went and spent the next 6+ hours checking out used car lots along with some more ads from the paper. We even talked with some used car salesmen about cars they would choose as reliable and how much would they sell a car like the one we had looked at earlier. After a lot of positive feedback about the second Toyota that we had looked at we agreed to purchase it. We returned around 8:00 pm where we told the Geoff and Fran that we were interested in the car and just had to talk about price. We agreed on $3000 Aus and a pick up time on Thursday of noon. We talked for quite a while tonight and Geoff and Fran are a very interesting couple with very good hearts. Erin and I were relieved to have accomplished this task. We returned home around 9:00 pm where we chatted with Julie before heading back out for a late dinner. After dinner Erin and I crashed early. Tomorrow we were moving on. We had appreciated the four nights that Julie hosted us but it was time for us to go. |