Our packing is a bit of a farce, but we’ll get there.

Well, it’s 10:30 pm on Tuesday night. We leave tomorrow before lunch time. Glenyce is standing staring at our double bed covered with clothing and she can’t decide what to pack, because we have to cope with the cold and the heat – well – warmth, at least.

I keep telling her “We’ll just buy anything you need in Cairns!”, but the uncertainty continues. I’ve got all my stuff in the caravan, or selected already and sitting in any of 3 drawers in the family room. Being a male makes it easier, for some reason I dare not even broach. Don’t go there, guys!! About 10 shirts, 4 or 5 sets of trousers, one set of shorts, 8 pairs of socks and 8 underpants. Plus 3 jumpers – one good, one OK, and one a bit tattered and good for driving, and setting up the van on arrival at wherever we are. And one pair of bathers, togs, swimmers or cozzies (whatever), which Glenyce informs me the elastic has perished. “I’ll buy them up there”, I said.

But I also need them for the four beaut pools at the caravan park in Moree, which pipes in heated Artesian water to the pools and mixes colder water in to give several pools at temperatures up to 39 degrees Celsius. The latter is very tiring, I remember from about 6 years ago when we went through. It’s quite fun there. Glenyce tells me the bathers will last through Moree. Of course, I could pack either of the ridiculous budgie smugglers I have from some years back when I passed through some phase or other – if I want to trigger a divorce! But my gut would now make me look like a muffin. It’s bad enough with the perished bathers I already possess.

And – Oh God! – the medications – making sure we’ve both have enough of the requisite pills we take for various “medical conditions”. We’ve both got written statements about our disorders, and the prescribed medications, plus enough repeat prescriptions to last up to 10 weeks on the road.

I hope to wean myself off the Temazepam I need to sleep well. I only take two at most, usually only one. But these benzodiazepines are somewhat addictive, and it’s better to not be addicted. We both find that caravanning makes us healthier. We’ll return  fitter, with fewer pains, and less weight!!! But as soon as I walk into the house, the post-nasal drip will return.  I have no idea what causes it, but I’m allergic to something in the house. I’m not selling the house just yet.

Now it’s 11 pm the night before we leave for the big trip. I have all of my data (over 800 GB) on the main desktop here at home transferred onto two 2 Terabyte hard drives, but not all, so right now I need to arrange the final backup of all of the Outlook emails (back to 2007!) and Contacts, plus all of the Internet Explorer ‘Favorites’  and ‘Cookies’, so that I can load them en route into the laptop and be ready for the road.

Wish us luck as we wave goodbye soon to downtown Glen Waverley, chock-a-block with Asian restaurants and Asian groceries. A most fascinating place now, too – it was rather boring before they started coming in!

Zài Jiàn, I recall it is in Mandarin. Or if you like: 再见.

“Goodbye”, I think it means. Someone will correct me!

Final packing will be a rush in and out in the Melbourne wind and showers

Hi everyone! Coming up to Tuesday now, the day before we leave for the first leg of our Cairns trip on Wednesday. They forecast the possibility of snow in the suburbs, so that would be novel for us. On Wednesday’s leg we only drive from Glen Waverley north-east to Wangaratta, via the Hume Highway. it’s a leisurely drive of about 4 hours, including a lunch stop at a roadhouse.

We always stay in caravan sites, with power, for the laptop, for camera recharging, and especially for the electric blankets and fan heater on the floor, which soon warms up the van if it’s cold – and we will indeed get cold weather, especially overnight, until we’re well up into Queensland. The blanket heat is needed for our arthritic spines and sciatica, and the pain control is helped by lots of codeine (Panadeine Forte) and also Lyrica, a medication for neurogenic pain, which is exactly the nature of the sciatic pain in our legs. Plus a few other pills for hypertension and other boring stuff …

The purpose is to visit Ron and Mary Hammersley, Glenyce’s brother and sister-in-law in Wangaratta. They’ve been rather ill lately, and in their 80s, so we’ll have a good family natter and go out for dinner. Then on Thursday we’ll get an early start – about 9 am departure – that’s early for us. We’re driving from Wangaratta to Forbes – about 440 km, and that’s about my limit. After that I get severe back pain and also get dangerously sleepy, helped by No-Doz tablets (caffeine). They do help to get extra mileage, but they’re not really very strong so I take about 4 at once! I don’t do that all that often. I have driven  900 km per day on several occasions, and I don’t recommend it! Glenyce does drive with the caravan, but only small amounts of the time.

Our overnight stays (at least one night) will be in sequence Wangaratta, Forbes, Coonabarabran, Moree, then perhaps St George, and then we’ll vary it, but will include Emerald (Qld), Charter’s Towers, and after 14 days travel we’ll enter Cairns on July 31st to settle in for 15 days in the beach-side caravan park at Palm Cove, north of Cairns , either coming down on that  day from inland in the Atherton Tablelands, or via the coastal road.

So it’ll be about 14 days of enjoyable travel in the Australian inland, starting from the Newell Highway, then varying it, especially to traverse through the Carnarvon Gorge country. We want to get well north into Queensland as soon as we can, in a business-like but leisurely fashion! Keep reading ….

Bill and Glenyce’s Caravan Trip to Cairns, 2016 – and blogs following our lives after that …….

bill&glenyce_w300px_2_cream&blkbdrPLEASE NOTE:  Please check the <—– LH SIDE among the butterflies for further Recent Posts.

Hello and welcome from Bill and Glenyce Leithhead,  from Glen Waverley, SE suburb of cosmopolitan Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, Australia. This ‘sticky’ Header was used in 2016 as part of a Blog, recording our caravan journey as a round trip from Melbourne to Cairns and back, from July 13th, to between the middle and the end of September. We aimed to escape the cold southern winter into the warmth of the tropical northern Queensland dry season, and to see more of this wonderful country of ours. It was an excellent trip, but too tiring to keep up the Travel Blog, so I ditched it.  But I’ve left this part in.
And so our lives continue on … we both turn 80 in 2018, but try to keep going in the face of arthritis and other challenges to our well-being ….

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