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.

Good hair day

Yesterday Nate and Eli and I took advantage of the courtesy shuttle and hung out at the big Stockland shopping centre for a few hours, just as long as we had to until the shuttle was due back. Maya wasn't feeling well (and had her second fever of our travels, maybe because of the close quarters?), so she stayed at the tourist park with Nick while he moved us into OUR VILLA. She is the dearest little sick person - curls up in bed and chats through her stuffy little nose, drifts off to sleep when she needs it, looks at books, listens to her body.

The shoe curse is still with us and has now taken my recently aquired black thongs. The toe strap snapped on the Great Barrier Reef boat. I haven't even had them for two months! Haviana is going to hear from me. In the meantime, however, I needed a new pair of shoes to wear. I borrowed Nick's new mock-crocs for the trip to the shops, and am now the proud owner of some $6 pink thongs. Pink? It was the only plain pair (like, without bedazzling or sequins or bows). Nick said it's like being married to a 12 year old. I've never been a pink person, but now I have a pink bag and matching pink shoes. Who am I???

We did a big shop, anticipating our full villa kitchen! Plenty of room in a full sized fridge for lots of fruit and veg - it all needs refrigeration up here in Cairns. All the fixings for an Indian dinner and a pizza dinner for the two nights we're here. An oven! Yay! We'll be baking cookies today.

It was so nice coming back to our villa. Yesterday was really hot and insanely humid, so we kept the air con set at 24 degrees and the overhead fans on low, and it was so nice in here. The villa has two bedrooms, one with a queen bed, one with two bunks, and the couch folds out into a bed as well. It isn't big, but it is a lot bigger than our motorhome, so we're feeling a bit luxurious and spread out. We brought in all of the toys and books and the kids really got into being less cramped.

We have also had the telly on a lot. The kids haven't watched any TV for weeks, but they have watched movies from our hard drive in the motorhome, and it's been the same things over and over. It's been nice for sick Maya to just chill out watching stuff she hasn't seen before while the boys hung out at the water park with Nick.

I loved taking a shower yesterday afternoon without having to pack and tote everything I would need off to a public shower, and without dripping with sweat on the way back to the motorhome. I washed my hair and noticed that last night it was all dry and silky smooth and relatively straight. Due to the humidity, I have been sporting a frizzy fro framed by some Maya-like ringlets since like Brisbane. But yesterday I was inside all afternoon.

Last night I heard the weatherman announce, "The humidity today was pretty atrocious, and it will be more of the same tomorrow." I'm really appreciating the opportunity to hang out inside.

We have clocked 5000 kilometres, which means it is time for a minor service to maintain the warranty. I'm hoping that won't be too expensive, although we have completely abandoned keeping track of the budget as of last week. We spent an insane amount of money with the reef tour, our trip to Kuranda (which I'll write about soon), and now the villa. Since we have been in Queensland we haven't been free camping - it rains at night and our windows let the rain right in so we have to close everything up, and then it becomes stifling inside with no power to run a fan or air con. All of the accommodation charges have really added up.

We will be heading back south, recharged and ready for the motorhome once again, and we won't be spending any more money on tours or theme parks or fancy accomodation or anything big like that. So we're giving up on the budget thing. We're no good at it anyway.

Jumping ship

Ahhhhhh. We are centimetres away from turning tail and heading back to Sydney.

1) It's the wet season! My plan to speed things up a bit rather than meandering so much doesn't fit with Mother Nature's plans of raining a lot and often.

Why this is a problem: Today we headed from Hervey Bay (which I haven't even written about yet! And if I don't, there was some incredible nightly bat activity that I still want to research a bit. I'm talking thousands upon thousands of bats flocking south every evening at dusk. Anyway...) through Bundaberg and towards Town of 1770. What a name. At least, we intended to go to 1770, but we were thwarted by water on the road. We braved a few floodways, but then we came to one that the ute in front of us wasn't even willing to try and we realised we weren't going to make it. We chatted with said ute driver and he shared his local knowledge with us - there are at least four more parts of the road that would have water over them at least as high as this between where we were and Miriam Vale which was at the Bruce Highway, our outlet. We weren't going to make it to 1770, and we weren't even going to make it through that way to Rockhampton. We had to turn back towards Bundaberg and cover that almost 70 kilometres all over again. Bummer. Annoying. Frustrating. All of that.

Also a problem because: That leak upstairs? It is a leak. Nick took some duct tape (the white kind, classy folk that we are) to the seal on the outside, hoping that this would at least temporarily alleviate the problem. When we stopped for lunch, however, he checked for water upstairs and found it. Plenty. We need to have it seen to by a professional, and we plan to do that tomorrow morning.

And one more wet season issue: Laundry is expensive. We'll pay the $3 to wash a load rather than hand washing - that's worth it to us, especially as we recycle our clothes as much as possible so don't create that much laundry. But the standard fee for drying is $1 for 10 minutes! Robbery! Tonight, for the first time, we are paying to dry our clothes because it has been raining since we left Suzy's house and nothing will dry. My Ergo got soaked through on the Fraser Island tour bus and won't dry. All of the towels we have been using to soak up the leak upstairs (under some plastic to keep the mattress dry) are in need of washing and drying. We are paying $18 for two loads of laundry.

2) F*&^ing mosquitoes. They are getting worse and worse. Maya and I look like we have gnarly skin conditions. It's gross and itchy and annoying and uncomfortable and maddening and frustrating, etc etc etc. And it isn't going to get any better in the direction we're going.

3) The beaches are from here on up are unswimmable, or so we're told. Stinger season, mate, from Rockhampton north. No fun. Oh well, it's raining anyway. Who wants to go to the beach?

4) Long stretches of driving ahead. There was a whole lotta nothing between Bundaberg and Rockhampton, just 340ish kilometres of driving. This is the longest we have gone in one stretch (besides from Sydney to Urunga), made especially long by our backtracking. We could have stopped, there were a few tiny places along the way, but we just weren't interested today - we wanted to get to a place where we could have our leak seen to. That place was Rockhampton, nothing closer. It is equally far to Mackay, then to Townsville, then to Cairns. Cairns is still over 1000 kilometres away! 1000 wet, dreary, wet, humid kilometres. The long distance driving part isn't the most fun in the world, and even less fun for the kids, especially little Eli. I can either be sitting up front with Nick, keeping him company on the lonely roads, or sitting back with the kids trying to keep them entertained. I find that I much prefer sitting up front. I just need to work harder on finding the joy in sitting in the kiddie section.

5) Close quarters. I'm not naming names, but one of my children is really hard to be around this closely for this long. Okay, maybe two of them. It's not doing any favours for our marriage either.

We're not going to give up the dream just yet though. I just don't know how we can keep it up when it is seeming more like hard work than the rewarding adventure we had hoped for. We're going to stick it out to Cairns. We're looking forward to the Whitsundays and the reef, and I'm still holding out hope that some Cape York miracle tour will fall in my lap. I think after that though, we might retreat with our tails between our legs. Maybe we'll say hello to our friends in Sydney and keep heading south. Not sure yet.

Coffs Harbour

7 January, 2010

We are loving Coffs Harbour. It is a really easy place to free camp. Check out our room with a view - it was so nice we stayed there two nights in a row:





What a way to wake up.





There's us up there, our view from our morning swim:





We spent ages digging canals and pools in the sand, frolicking on the rocks, and discovering caves. The tide came in and the boys had a little pool to play in.



And here's us doing the touristy thing at the Big Banana:



Last night we decided to stay at a caravan park so that we could plug in overnight to recharge our new battery (via our new $400 battery charger which our warranty didn't cover *insert big frowny face here*), fill up with water, drain our grey water, and empty the toilet. A few things we have learned:

-We actually need to have some sort of idea how much power we're using so that we can keep track of when we need to recharge our battery. If it runs completely flat, it takes days to recharge at the battery shop.

-The $35 food quality water hose is worth the money. We paid $6 for a hose at Big W, and our Brita-filtered water all tastes like, well, a hose. So we'll be forking over the cash for the better hose.

-Don't think you can just empty your portable toilet every day and that will negate the need for toilet chemicals. The toilet chemicals are completely, absolutely necessary. And yes, you can buy 100% biodegradable, septic-safe, "green" chemicals for only a bit more money.

-Despite their assurances to the contrary before we bought the wireless broadband modem, there is no 3 network coverage in Coffs Harbour. It's a bit ridiculous really. And the people at the other end of the phone haven't even heard of Coffs Harbour because they are in India, so they don't understand just how ridiculous it is that there is no coverage here. Go with the big players - Telstra or Optus.

-Five people fit quite comfortably into two double beds, as long as two of them are very short.