Welcome to the New Year of great adventures!

G'day Mates,

We hope you had a wonderful New Years Eve and Day, and we wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year!!

Now lets go on with the adventures. From Cania we are going to family on the Gold Coast to have Christmas together (yes I'm going back in time a bit) and I'll show you we passed a few nice little towns;

This one f.i. is Gayndah and we saw this in a shop, didn't know what it was so the lady behind the counter told us that was an old paying system from the 1920's........

With this "gun" they shoot the little wooden box with the docket and money to the men in the centre.....

and he shoots it back with a signed docket and change....

These days the flying fox is heritage listed for its cultural and historic value, as are the display windows in the front of the shop. We also liked these signs outside.....

Gayndah was overall a very nice little village....

Just somewhere in a garden....

We also have been in Beerwah, a nice place near the Glasshouse mountains but we had such bad weather, I don't have any pictures of that but I must say, the show ground was fantastic....

We also had a nice with with our family before Christmas and we went for a drive to Kingscliff, which is just over the border of Queensland/NSW;

Walking up this mountain for the great view.....

Excellent "fisherman", enjoying his meal.....

Reaching Christmas we also had a cosy time in our caravan.....

After Christmas we decided to go in a hurry to Victoria, there are school holidays now and because of that the prices of the caravan parks are sky high and the roads are very busy and there is road work everywhere, 

we didn't want to spent too much time on the road. 

Our first stop was Grafton, on the Greyhound race course and that was interesting....

There were races in the afternoon so of course we had a look at how that goes......

They transport the dogs in sort of little caravan, some even have an air conditioner.... 

They are being inspected on several things like the paws and they are being weighted.....

the owners walking them to the start.....

Movie time!!

From Grafton we went to the show ground in Kempsey and again it was terrific!! Mind you, these show grounds are really payable, instead of paying approx. $ 55.00 or even more for a caravan park you only pay $ 20.00, including power and water.....

and it was close to town so we could walk to the shops.....

Our last Show ground for this year was Cessnock, again good but the amenities weren't too clean. In Cessnock we had New Year Eve and a Champagne breakfast on New Years Day......

After a terrible drive from Cessnock, which is north of Sydney, to Milton where we are now, we are relaxing and having a great time. We are on the Milton show ground and it is overcast, no wind at all and a nice temperature.  Both reading in our e-books and time to time looking around to the fabulous view. 

The trip was only 350 k's but "kwebbel", which is our navigator and we called it that because it's got a weird voice, just led us on normal roads through the busy suburbs of Sydney instead of going on the Toll way A1 which is through the city but a much better and quicker option!! And even before as after Sydney there are a lot of hills and you know our car has trouble with hills! 

Creeping up as a snail with loads of cars behind us isn't really relaxing. God, are we tired, especially Fred of course as driver. But me too, every mussel is stiff because of me feeling tense going down the hills as I don't like that, our brakes are not the best either you know!

We left Milton actually because the forecast predicted a lot of rain and we didn't want to get stuck there as we have an appointment in Victoria. So we left and luckily the traffic wasn't that bad, it wasn't so busy.  But still, there are a lot of hills in New South Wales and we had trouble going up. The worst was just our speed dropped to 30 k's on the steepest mountain, that not really the problem but the cars behind you who detest us and horn when they can finally can pass. I don't know what to do, we can't afford another car which is stronger so we and they (the fellow road user ) just have to cope!

But that was not the only burden. This second bad day in a row was because of the heavy rain we had. What we expected in Milton came on our way and we even had to stop because we couldn't see well any more and still a lot of people passed in high speeds when we stood still along the side of the road. When you tow a caravan it is more dangerous so we had to stop. What a disaster. 

Totally tired we arrived at our free camp and there we had another two bad experiences.

First when we opened the caravan we smelled alcohol. Nothing unusual actually for us but it is when we are not drinking, so we were afraid that some of the bottles under the bed was broken. Then I saw the wet carpet under the fridge and found out when I opened the door that a can of beer had been damaged and the beer was all over the place. Yak

It looks like people are getting more and more anti social. We had a camper van next to us who suddenly turned on his engine while other people behind them were having tea. We even had the smell of exhaust fume in our caravan, it was disgusting.  They had it running at least for an hour. We don't like generators but I rather have a generator for an hour next to me then a running engine!

4 th of January ; third terrible day in a row. From the free camp in Genoa we drove to Sale. Too much hills again and the whole trip we had rain. My feet are getting wet as somewhere the car is leaking. I hope we will win the lottery soon as we are not going to keep this car!

But then, we were nearly in Sale when we entered another small village and a woman in a car passed us and yelled we had to stop and was pointing to our caravan, My God what now??

With the umbrella holding above Fred, because of course it was still raining, we managed to fix it as luckily we had a spare wheel in the caravan. 

Finely, after all these troubles we arrived safely at family in Victoria.

What can you expect from me this year?? Well, in the mean time we booked  holiday again in The Netherlands but before that we'll have a few house sittings to do. 

So, new area's means new adventures! See ya soon!

Cheers!