2019/11 Australia trip - News from Hope |
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November 2019
Dear All,
This letter tells the story of our 2019 trip to Australia, primarily to New South Wales.
Firstly though, we have some news from Hope. Our biggest surprise was when Dave and Lorraine’s house went up for sale. We hadn’t seen any activity there since their son Shaun and his wife came out to turn off the water for winter. The house is still packed with their hoard and history and there is an ancient Lincoln in the driveway, plus three decrepit boats and assorted junk in the yard. Rather than do any clean-up the family has chosen to sell it “as is”, so any buyer has to do their own clean-up. The realtor’s web pages begin with views of the river but end with pictures of rooms full of junk but missing parts of walls and ceilings. It’s for sale at $299000, which would be about the value of the lot if it wasn’t right next to the bridge..
We’d been doing the usual winter preparation: antifreeze into the camper’s tanks and snow tyres on the Jeep. We had a succession of wind storms, ripping off some more shingles, so we had our handyman back to glue them down. He also fixed one of our downspouts that got blown away; the guttering system came with a really good warranty but it’s not much help when the company’s out of business!
Thursday October 31st
We had lunch with Bob and Pat in Chilliwack and then headed in to Vancouver Airport. Our flight wasn’t until around midnight so we had a really early check-in My laptop’s battery was only good for about 20 minutes so I sat by a charging pole so I could plug in. After 20 minutes it powered off so I moved to another pole where people were already plugged in, but it didn’t start up, so I thought I’d be carrying a laptop with a failed charging circuit board all the way to Australia. An hour later somebody sat down next to me, plugged in his phone, and complained “this one’s dead too”. I told him he’d made my day. All the charging poles in the terminal were dead. My laptop battery was flat but chargeable.
We left at around midnight on Thursday and arrived on Saturday morning; Friday never really happened as we crossed the date line, moving on a day. Total flight time was around 16 hours, our longest ever, but not the longest in the world; the current record is held by a flight from Newark to Perth at over nineteen hours.
Both of us had back pain and I had leg pain too, like a rat was gnawing my calf, so we didn’t get much sleep; I got to watch a lot of bad movies.