The featured image is of a heritage listed house, just close to St Matthew’s Church, Guildford.
The houses along this street back onto wetlands and the river. Very nice indeed.
We ended up with 16 of the 21 members of the choir participating in the Songfest. Two people are not actually in this photo, myself and another person who arrived a little later. We were reasonably happy with our performances, though we completely stuffed up one song on on Sunday by not getting our starting notes. We should have stopped and started the song again, but that is easy to say in retrospect, harder to always do what is best when under pressure.
We took the Winnie, with the idea that we might stay overnight, and even if we didn’t, it gave us a place to change in and out of our choir gear, plus we had food for our lunches. In the end, we didn’t stay overnight although we stayed for part of the evening concert. It was a particularly cold night, officially down to 2-3 degrees, and, although we have heating, Stephen was feeling under pressure as the only bass in the choir, and wanted to be sure of having a good night’s sleep. It was still worthwhile having the Winnie there during both days.
On Sunday there was a market set up near the church, which was handy for having coffee after the choir warmup at 10.00 a.m. Stephen and I walked to Guildford Grammar Chapel to hear an opera singer perform as part of the Festival. She had a constant vibrato which did not play well in a church with a lot of reverberation, but her high notes were thrilling, less vibrato and intensely beautiful. We could only stay for three songs as we had to get to back to St Matthew’s to perform, but it was worth it.
We put the fridge on gas on Saturday, despite being on a slope. We came back to the van to find the gas alarm beeping. I checked for a gas leak yesterday, and found that there was a very slow leak from the connecting valve, just needs a little tightening. I had watched someone check for gas leeks on Youtube, it is a bit messy for sure, but easy to do.
On Sunday we left the fridge on DC power, which was bad for the batteries because we were under shade, but Winnie was on a bit of a slope again and we didn’t want to risk setting off the alarm again. The level went down to 12.3 and 12.2 is the lowest they should go. When we plugged in at home later in the day the fan on the battery charger went made for a while, pushing the batteries up over 14. Eventually it settled down. 13.8 is normal for our batteries, whether from the solar or when plugged into mains.
We will have the Winnie serviced this Friday. She is running well at the moment, but the yearly service gives us peace of mind. The only other thing we should have done is to have the slide out serviced, but we have a long trip planned for next year and will probably have a complete ‘house’ service before we go.
We have booked tickets for the National Folk Festival in Canberra next year. We would leave Perth shortly after Matt’s birthday on the 19th March. We may also go to a writer’s festival in Sydney. It’s possible to camp in a national park with full hookups, walk 10 minutes to a train station and take a 20 minute train journey to the centre of the city. Neat! The only thing comparable is when we camped in a caravan park in Paris – all those long years ago when we travelled from England to Munich in a campervan. I wonder if the caravan park in Paris still exists.
Our journey would take a couple of months and we hope that G, our usual housesitter, will be available.