It’s now the beginning of August and yes, we are still here at the caravan park in Tweed. It’s been four and a half months now and that’s a long time for us as we are used to being on the move all the time. Hopefully though, COVID restrictions permitting, we will be leaving shortly after the 31st August. That’s a significant date as it’s the completion date on a house we are buying in Banora Point. (Coincidently, it was the 30th of August, 7 years ago that we sold our house in Caringbah, 15 months after starting this adventure) Yes, we are buying a house and no one could be more surprised that us. While being bored in the isolation restrictions we were driving around looking at houses for sale. This was prompted by us talking with Pat and Roz who were also staying on the park and were seriously looking to buy, unlike us who were just bored! Pat and Roz had looked at many many houses but had not found what they were looking for. Now they have gone off travelling again putting buying a house on hold while we are the ones buying. Go figure! We have no intentions of settling down yet though as we still love our nomadic lifestyle, or we will again when we get back out there.
The house has been fully renovated and will be our perfect choice when we do stop travelling but in the mean time we will put tenants in. Buying this house now means we don’t have to start hunting around in a couple of years time as I reach pension age.
So what’s happening with COVID? Well it’s starting to take hold again after relaxing of some restrictions. Queensland has opened it’s border but with major restrictions and could close again at any time due to the minority, dubbed “Covidiots” who insist on doing the wrong thing. The state of Victoria is getting the brunt of the COVID at the moment with all residents asked to wear face masks while in public. Sydney has several hot spots and now we have cases just across the border in Queensland. (It’s getting closer!)
Mum’s aged care had begun to relax restrictions, allowing 2 visitors any day without appointments but have now again gone back to total lockdown with no visitors. Not ideal but we do understand.
Trying to get across the Qld/NSW border has been a nightmare for many people who work across from where they live. There has been big delays and so many different border passes, it’s hard to keep up.
We did manage to get up to Noosa to see my brothers and families and also to celebrate our friend, Ellen’s 70th birthday. We expected there to be big delays the day we left so we planned ahead. The border was opening to non residents at midday so at 9.30am we left our van at the park and drove to park in a slip road opposite Jack Evan’s Park, as near to the border as we could get. We then went for a walk around the shopping centre to kill time until midday. We waited until just after 12.00 before we pulled out of our parking spot (along with all the other people who had the same thoughts as us) as we didn’t want to hit the border too soon with the then wrong permit and be turned back to go around again. We were through in 10 minutes and missed the big delays that we saw on the news that evening. Our early planned start turned out to be a good move! We had a good weekend catching up with family and friends before heading back home to our van on the Tuesday.
We have decided to wait out our time here at the park until the completion date of the house sale instead of leaving sooner. Even though we have everything set up so we don’t need to be here we thought about it and decided we didn’t want to be too far away just in case something went wrong. So here we are, sitting out our time doing the same things that we have been doing for weeks, and weeks and weeks. Do you get the impression that we are ready to get back out there? I think so!