I was awoken by that annoying buzzing in my left ear in the
middle of the night. A mosquito. I was wide awake in seconds and could feel
I’d been bitten a few times. We’d gone
for the full ‘open everything’ tonight due to the intense heat. My bug spray had clearly worn off. I got up and re-coated myself before catching
some more zeds. It’s been an adventure
in Ozzie, but I’m not going to deny that I’m looking forward to sleeping in an
air-conditioned motel room tonight with hopefully no bugs! And hoping that our
new van’s air conditioning is effective!
I enjoyed a lovely swim and shower this morning and then we
hit the road. Well, it was effectively
just crossing the road! Simon had
spotted the Australian Aviation Heritage Museum right across from where we were
staying. Ozzie isn’t due to be handed
back until 3pm today, so we’re making the most of having him available until
then. I chose to sit out on this Museum
experience. It saved money and I’m sure
Simon will have told me all about it!
Instead, I set to tidying everything together in the van for our moving
out this afternoon.
Si was done by noon.
I had checked with the cheap motel we booked for the night and we would
be able to check in a little earlier than the 330pm as our booking said, so we
had a couple of hours to kill. As we’d
overfilled the petrol tank of the camper we had a little mileage to play with,
so we headed to East Point and Dudley Point to get some alternate views of the
city - imagine having a stunning beach like this on your doorstep but not being able to go swimming there because of the crocodiles.
We then headed to our hotel for just gone 130pm.
The Winnellie Hotel Motel (even it can’t decide what it is)
was never going to set the world alight.
It was a little run down and we had to go into the attached pub to check
in (why’s that bad?!) but it had some very important things going for it – the
room was an icy 20 degrees, there was a fridge to store our chilled goods in,
we had our own bathroom and a kettle. It
would do nicely. It took three trips to
transfer all of our belongings from Ozzie into the room, then we were off to
find the car wash. We had no intention
of doing a thorough valet but at the same time, we have our pride. Si focussed on the outside whilst I swept and
cleaned the inside of the van (in the aircon).
Maybe I was too harsh on Ozzie in the first place – he didn’t scrub up
bad after our hard work.
Timed to perfection, we pulled up to Travellers’ Autobahn at
255pm. There was only one member of
staff there, but luckily we were also the only customers. Asked if we’d had any issues with the van we
mentioned that the fridge has been fine since the repair job in Carnarvon and
mentioned that the Police thought the tread on the rear right tyre was getting
a little low! We were only there for 15 minutes;
the paperwork was signed off to say that they were happy with the condition we
had returned their van in and they called us a cab. Job done.
The final mileage figure? 7509 km…. in 4 weeks! That explains the petrol bills then! What’s
that in miles? Google tells me it’s 4666!
We were doing about 3000 miles a month in the States so we’ve pushed it
even further this last month.
 |
| We'd put a few extra kms on the old van.... |
Back at the motel by 330pm without wheels, we had a night
free from driving. Maybe we would both
relax in our air-conditioned room and catch up with some internet whilst
watching some TV? Both having been
looking forward to this, we were disappointed to find that the Wi-Fi in our
room was so poor we would have to choose – one of us could go on the very slow
internet…. But it meant that the TV stopped working! Neither of us wanting to be selfish, we
resigned ourselves to not being able to do that blogging/Facebooking after all.
Just past 630pm we agreed it was time to source some dinner. Simon had decided that he didn’t want to set
foot outside of the air conditioning again today so I ‘volunteered’ to go over
the road to the Greek takeaway we’d spotted.
Except that it was shut. As was
the Chinese takeaway further down the road.
Next stop, the shell garage where I rang Simon and asked what his choice
of hot pie might be?! I went for a
spinach and cheese one and grabbed some other naughty nibbles and a six-pack of
beers for a treat. It was a tasty
dinner! And I even managed to find a
channel showing Mythbusters on the TV, so the evening wasn’t too shabby at all.
Now time to get some sleep with no bugs and in a reasonable temperature... bliss.
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