2015/11 Australia trip - Yarra River |
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Wednesday November 25th
This was our last full day of the trip and we spent the morning experimenting with our packing. We’d added books and tee shirts as presents and Sandie wanted to bring some of our camping gear home. We were going to be up against the weight limits on everything.
The day rapidly became warm, humid, and windy. John was taking us to Jumping Creek park. We saw an echidna on our way. This 
one posed for us; they don’t see well but they react quickly to noise, so we stood still until it came out of its defensive pose. The park turned out to be closed because of the fire risk.
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Echidna (1.01) |
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Instead we went for a walk along the Yarra River at Warrandyte. The river is shallow there, riffling over rocky shelves, and shaded by tall trees. We walked the river bank; the area’s close to town and not wild, but we saw ducks, herons, lorikeets, and cockatoos, all common in the area but nice to see them again.
We finished our packing, leaving an awful lot of camping junk for John and Edna to dispose of.
Thursday November 26th
John and Edna took us to the airport through rush hour traffic, slow but moving. The airport parking is very confusing with lots of dead end alleys which you can’t get out of without the line of cars behind you first reversing out. The operators don’t care: drivers are paying for the time they are stuck.
Goodbyes get harder when you’re all getting older. However, even though we don’t plan to return to Australia for this kind of camping trip it’s possible we’ll come back and rent a cottage somewhere, perhaps on the east coast.
In Auckland we had to go through security again for our next flight, to San Francisco. Sandie had her jade ornament in her coat pocket and the agent accused her of trying to smuggle a Maori artifact out of New Zealand. Her piece of Australian jade was carved in the design of a “mere”, a Maori ceremonial war club. Luckily he found her receipt and information about the mine and then reluctantly allowed her to keep it.
To change planes in San Francisco we had to go through US Immigration, but everything seemed pretty relaxed. San Francisco was very quiet, as it was the Americans’ Thanksgiving Day. We had a full flight to Vancouver and we didn’t help much by adding a bag of duty free to our pile of stuff.
In Vancouver we had a two hour drive to Hope. The temperature was at freezing point and there was a nasty wind, but the road was dry. In Hope there were piles of tree debris still around from the storm. The house looked OK.
We guessed that Wes had swept the driveway for us. We’d worry about the shingles in the morning. We’d been up for 35 hours. It had been a great holiday, even if we were exhausted.