Sunday 28th April, 2019

Today we are having a rest day. My cold seems to have freshened up again, after quite a good day yesterday and Stephen’s tiredness at the end of yesterday was pretty extreme, so it seems like a good idea. We cooked a meal in the pressure cooker, but using the slow cooking method for the first time. We now have three good meals of meat and vegetables and only need to add some greens to make them into complete meals.

We have been discussing what to do next on our journey as we need to head West quite soon. Although I haven’t seen my mother for a few weeks I seem to be able to imagine how she is in my mind’s eye as she seems to be easily tired. They have started her on patches for pain management, even though she reports little pain. Staff and my family feel that she is actually in quite a lot of pain as she appears to struggle along each time she returns from ‘upstairs’. I think if we are heading in the right direction towards home I will feel less anxious about being away.

We are actually leaving Thursday, not Friday as I thought, having read the booking slip wrongly. That means we have three more full days of exploring Sydney. Then, we will head directly west for Katoomba in the Blue Mountains region, before heading south west in a line taking us towards Bathurst.

A couple of loads of washing have been done as well. This is our idea of a rest day. When we stay at East Croydon we don’t go out every single day. We feel that we can, as it were, waste a bit of time because we are staying longer. At least in EC we have a tram to take us almost to where we live, here we have a 1.5 kilometre walk. The bus stop for the return journey is further than the bus stop for the outward jouney.

We’ve spent most of our sitting time outside today as it was cooler than inside the van and gives us a sense of having more living space. This is something we tend not to do when travelling as we have comparitively little time to ‘sit around’.

This is our evening for contacting Matt, it does seem to come around quite quickly.