When I last spoke with my sister she said she is calling our van the ‘little Winnie’. I played with Mini Winnie, then realised that we need only change one letter for our getaway vehicle and call it Minnie.
Yesterday I had my monthly coffee date with Matthew. He decided on this when having his goal setting for the year session with staff when we were overseas. I expect he was missing us very much at the time.
Anyway, his house supervisor suggested we go across to the park where there is a coffee van. We had a nice walk, but the coffee van was taking a break until the 15th January. We went back to his house, had hot drinks, and switched from reruns of Mr Bean on the TV to watching our latest home movie, filmed just before Christmas. The people in his house normally have lots of outings during the week, but not during the Christmas New Year fortnight. Matt likes Mr Bean, but I expect even he gets tired of it.
We have had shower of rain this morning. Almost always when the weather bureau says there is a slight chance of rain it rains in our locality. It is enough rain to water gardens.
We were wanting to take another overnight trip and have contacted a friend of our who lives in York. When she first moved there a couple of years ago she invited us to bring our van and camp at her place. As we are having a few days of cooler weather now seems like a good time. It’s all about spending another night in the van and Pinaroo Point is better in warmer weather. So, we will have an overnight in York and be back in time to have tea with Matt tomorrow night.
Stephen has compiled a one page overview of our overseas trip. It’s great for savouring our memories of our time in Europe and England. It isn’t finished as we keep thinking of new things to add. We have the blog, of course, but a one page summary is a quick way of jogging our memories. I enjoyed the rail journey far more than I thought I would, especially as we slowed things down after a few days and got into a rhythm of working out our transport between and within cities and towns.
Last night we watched a YouTube video of a family travelling in a caravan from Broome to Lake Argyle near Kununurra. We have a trip planned for this winter to Karijini and Marble Bar. We are wondering about going up to Lake Argyle. It’s a long way to travel but it looks wonderful. We also want to explore the Burrup Peninsula on our way home. Lots of things we have been waiting to do for a few years, and now is the time. It will be warm during the days, but could be chilly overnight inland from the sea. We are travelling with my sister and her husband on the Karijini leg of the journey, it would be great if they could come further with us, but it’s impossible for them to get away for a longer time.
As we were watching the video Stephen recalled his travels in the region from years ago when he took a Greyhound trip around Australia. I was busy staring a new career as a psychologist at the time and didn’t go with him, apart from joining him for a weekend in Alice Springs. We did a tour of Uluru and Kings Canyon and it was my first visit to Alice Springs since I left when I was eight years old. Now I wish I had gone with him on the Greyhound trip of course, but perhaps I will enjoy it much more now that I’m retired and more relaxed. Back to Stephen’s trip, it was interesting to see some of the places he visited. He took a four wheel drive camping tour in an OKA from Broome through to Darwin, sleeping in a swag and being well looked after by the crew.
We’ve decided that if we do go to Lake Argyle we will budget for a sunset tour exploring the lake. It’s expensive, but looks to be well worth it. In addition, as we don’t have a four wheel drive vehicle we may need to pay for some tours in order to reach places of interest. We were getting a bit more inclined to spend money as we don’t know how long we will have good enough health for travelling, especially long road trips.