Log Eighty Three -Winter Escape

19 July 2022

After a hiatus of nearly twelve months now seemed to be a good time to get back to recording my thoughts and our travel experiences.

We are back on the road for at least a month and who knows maybe longer. We are not good at making definitive plans. That said on this trip we are actually booked into camp grounds over the next three weeks.

My motivation for this trip is to complete the Parkrun alphabet challenge. This involves running at 26 events that start with each letter of the alphabet. At the time of leaving home I had four letters to complete the alphabet. After this I might try for runs in every State. Parkrun is a 5 km run conducted on Saturday mornings all over Australia and around the world.

A few months ago we went crazy and bought an RV. It was there in the sales yard ready to be bought with no 18 month waiting period. It was too good to be true and it had everything we wanted especially a tow bar to carry our bikes. So we are now the proud owners of an RV and a caravan. The RV is for short trips and bike adventures and the caravan for longer tours over weeks or months, at least that’s the plan. Maybe we are just trying to recreate our younger days of travelling the US in our Chevy van.

We left home in early July and headed north where it must be warmer. Wrong, the morning I ran Parkrun it was -3c at 8:00am. The next day the car was covered in frost as we packed up and drove to the coast and warmer days, it was -5c!

All locals are well aware, however for my overseas readers I need to explain about travel from inland Australia to the east coast. From Cairns to Melbourne if you travel from inland areas to the coast you almost always have to drive over the Great Dividing range and that means a long downhill drive. As it was for us on this trip we had a day of driving down through the mountains with several hairpin bends. A lot of fun towing a 2.5 tonne caravan. We avoided roads that have were severely damaged by the recent rains and floods.

Along our travels we stopped at the site of the Myall Creek massacre. It’s sobering to quietly walk the site where 28 aboriginal women and children were murdered back in 1838. No doubt there are massacre sites across Australia just not as well commemorated as Myall Creek.

As expected the coast is substantially warmer and we are now enjoying weather that does not include frosts. I have completed two Parkruns and have only the letters Y and V to go.

There will be more and within the next week or so, not in 12 months time…..