Unlucky streak? Unfortunate, at least.

It started with things slowly happening to the motorhome. First it was the house battery and battery charger, which wasn't cheap to fix. We broke a key and had to get a new one made at a locksmith's. We popped some screws out of the awning and it hasn't been quite right since. There was the ding on the back bumper from backing into a tap, yet to be fixed. Then there was the broken lid on the bathroom vent - whenever it rained, it rained in our bathroom. We got that fixed. The leak upstairs was a big one, but Nick fixed it (temporarily) with duct tape. So then we developed a new leak in the back. It's not as bad as the first one, but still. Now our house water pump has gone, and we have no running water. Also, there is a fuse up front blown (I hope it's a fuze anyway) and our chargers, light and radio aren't working. And our rego runs out this month. Aaarrgghhh. We don't like not having running water, and all of this is making us even more eager to get back to Sydney, where we can check the motorhome in for repairs and not have it be our only home.

So we drove. We left Cairns on Thursday after our pancake breakfast, and drove to Bowen, a good effort. Friday was Bowen to Rockhampton, and we watched the scenery changing. Saturday we hoped to make it to the Sunshine Coast, but with the cooler weather (the first two driving days were hot and sweaty) the kids were quite happy in the car, so we drove straight to the Gold Coast. Straight to Treasure Island again for us. We decided to stay for two nights so that we could have a nice day off driving. The kids spent Sunday enjoying the kids club activities and the pool.

It's not just the motorhome though. When I was opening up the hard drive to put some pictures on my Kuranda blog post, it gave me an error message and froze up. We were unable to open it again. I figured I wouldn't worry. We would take it into an IT person to check it out. The data - an emotionless, technical term for all of the thousands of photos we have taken since we moved to Australia in 2004, three children's baby pictures, 6 years of life, Christmases, birthdays, overseas visits - had to still be there.

We took our little hard drive to a "data recovery specialist" this morning, and he was unable to recover said data. Ever the optimist, my first thought was, "So he couldn't get into it, but at least he didn't get in to see there was nothing there!" He gave us the contact details for Australia's data recovery people for our brand of hard drive, and we'll call them once we get to our friends' place. Then we'll have to do something that makes me really nervous: We will have to send this little box that contains so many memories off in the post to some computer geeks who don't know us and don't particularly give a shit about our photos. Dear computer geeks, please please pleeeeeeease recover our data.