Perth Week 43-44

Perth

Week 43 and 44

I must make a confession across the “ether”. I have not been good and broken my habits. I have had a few “Where is the blog?” comments, so I guess many of you are back into the usual routines of your lives, so here goes nothing.

We arrived in Perth a fortnight ago on a sweltering day of 44 degrees. The office hours here are shocking at Advent Park. Arrive between eight and ten or four and six, five on a Friday and not at all on a Saturday. Thus when we arrived you couldn’t relieve the heat with air-conditioners. We tell ourselves that we are acclimatising for the eastward push through WA and across the Nullabor into SA. Though the weather here is rather erratic, those high temperatures are a feature at the present.

The other feature is the wind, anabatic, the hot air rushing in gusts like bowling balls hurled down an alley. This park has hundreds of pines and she-oaks so the sound of the wind in their upper reaches is magnified. We have spent many a night waiting to be wrapped in the annex or for the shuddering van to groan and roll over. Still we are still here to tell the tale, so perhaps I am using a bit of writer’s license.

We aren’t really city people, so we are over the traffic and the hurly burly. Visit Freemantle on the weekend and you stand shoulder to shoulder with thousands, not my idea of fun. We have discovered new ways of getting there - all roads lead to Freemantle eventually. We also visited King’s Park and the botanic gardens again, but the heat was enervating, the flower displays dormant, so it paled in comparison to our last visit. It did give us a chance to test out the “cleaned” camera to check we aren’t getting sky spots any more.

Aside from sitting out the school holidays, Brian has been busy doing maintenance, his elbows literally covered in grease. He has greased and cleaned, drilled holes and banged and hammered to his hearts content. The one tourist activity he enjoyed most was a visit to the old mill in Toodyay with working machinery. He was literally drooling. I do believe he still missed the daily challenge of keeping old machinery working and usable long past their use-by dates. Sounds a bit like us, doesn’t it?

Murphy’s Law as it is, you can’t go anywhere without meeting someone who knows someone, in this instance Ivan and Margaret, friends of our Qld caravaning compatriots, Dennis and Colleen who many of you know, and apologies for those of you who don’t. It is a small world.

We feel a bit dreadful over here in the dry, missing the rain and flooding over in the east. (That is, not being able to pitch in and help with the cleanup.) It is inconceviable the loss of life and the devastation. What a waste!

We have taken advantage of the golf course across from us several times and I have taken advantage of Burswood several times, with Brian’s blessing, but not his company. He became the taxi driver because he can’t think of anything worse than gambling, but I’m hooked. C’est la vie. The hook is a bit like the golf swing, off into trouble on the sides of the fairway. We figure we aren’t going to see many familiar golf courses in the next few weeks and will have to get used to dirt and sand greens. For people who didn’t like the game till two years ago, you have to wonder at our tenacity.

Our grandson Kyan has been on his first camping trip, and if I am savy enough with my technology, I will once again succeed in transferring the evidence from the phone to my computer. If you see a picture here, you know I must be congratulated, if not, some advice may be helpful.

Have a great week. Thank you all for sticking with us through the long haul. Fingers crossed all the people we know in the south east of Queensland have survived in tact. My brother Ken had a flooded business, but his home was high and dry and Adele lives in a suburb also high and dry, but I’m sure the aftermath is affecting them still. Chris and Margaret, hope you have got through and Gazz and Lorraine, were you in the Toowoomba area at the wrong time??

Cheers from the nomads, all set to return to adventure tomorrow, Sunday 16/1/2011. Onward Ho!

The “ready to go” Nomads