2015/10 Australia trip - Mulgrave and Jells Park |
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John and Edna collected us in their spiffy new Mitsubishi Outlander. Melbourne was cool and breezy, or freezing as John put it. They both looked well, a relief as when John last Skyped us he had a heart monitor plugged into his chest. He’s had a couple of minor strokes in recent years and the monitor had been there for a few days just to gather diagnostics.
Melbourne and Mulgrave looked much the same but their house looks different from the road. They have new fencing and a sliding gate on the front of the property so all the vehicles are inside the fence including their A-frame travel trailer. They still use the Troopie but as a tow vehicle for their trailer. Another change is that the tree has gone from the front yard and the flower beds seem to be thriving without it.
We needed to get some exercise to ward off jet lag so they drove us to nearby Jell’s Park for a walk. I remember running to there a lot of years ago. The park has a good-sized lake and a large bird population: coots, parrots, cockatoos, and cormorants. I hadn’t unpacked my big lens but got these pictures with my pocket camera, a white ibis and a purple swamphen, or so the signs said. It looked to me like a gallinule or a moorhen or a pukeko, but I’ve since found that those are all names for basically the same bird.
Back in Mulgrave, Edna was feeding us well and we were succumbing to jetlag after over thirty hours of travel. The battle with the black rat woke us up. From their living room they have a view across the pool to their fruit trees and have been seeing this rat raiding the crop. John’s been finding like we did that it’s hard to trap or poison rats without killing birds. Rats are canny and the battle continued.
Thursday October 1st
I heard a crash during the night, but was too groggy to investigate, and in the morning we found a chandelier crashed onto the billiard table. There was no damage other than to the ceiling; the builders had just attached the light to a toggle in the ceiling and it had let go after 20 years.
It was sunny and warmer and we walked to the nearby Waverley Gardens centre for some shopping and banking. The certified cheque we’d sent to the bank months earlier had been sent “back” to John’s address as we hadn’t endorsed it. We submitted our cheque in person and they confirmed that clearing would take 28 days even though it was a certified bank draft. They even thought that it was going to be 28 working days, but luckily that wasn’t the case. We verified that we could withdraw Australian cash on our USA debit cards, but we’d get hit with fees every time we did that.
There was a lot we should have been getting on with but we veg’d the afternoon away chatting. The rat was still visible occasionally. Another problem had surfaced: the kitchen stove would not hold a temperature; it would turn itself off once it reached the temperature setting, not good when you have guests.
Friday October 2nd
We started work on getting the camper loaded and relearning all the details after not using it for five years. John had noticed that the flexible connection to our camper’s stove was crimped and might be brittle. He took me off to Bunnings, an outdoors store, and we soon found that modern propane connectors are a bit different; we would probably have to have a new one made. John took us to Dandenong, but most places were closed for the holiday and we’d have to try again the next day.
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