Canberra

Planning, preparation and relaxation

So it was back to good old Canberra, our old home town and still the home town of Rae's family who kindly agreed to put up with us and find us a bed for the two weeks before we head off on the first leg of our trip.

The first thing we had to do was get all our papers and other things in order.Having lived through the horrors of the French style of beaurocracy this was probably the part of the trip we were dreading the most...but Canberra came through with the goods.It only took us two days to change our addresses for all major documents back to Australia, do some bank stuff, update our driving licenses, and best of all find, purchase and register a car for our trip.We had thought we might need more than a week to get this all done, but two days later we were sitting on the couch wondering what on earth we were going to do for the next couple of weeks....but Rae's mum has a household of the worlds nicest food and goodies so the answer was to sit back and increase our fat levels before we went camping!

It was good to catch up with a number of friends either in person or on the phone, and those that we didn't see we will try and meet with the next times we are back in Canberra closer to Christmas.In particular we had fun with Stacy and her fiancé Trevor on a couple of nights including a trip to pitch and putt, and are now really looking forward to their wedding in January 2010.

We were also back just in time to see Rae's youngest brother graduate from year 12 which marked the end of 25 years that her and her sisters have been in school between the five of them, and certainly Luen had a tear in her eye as she saw her final child graduate - certainly an amazing achievement to have brought up such a great and successful (so far!) family.

We were also back into the world of easy access to play and watch sport.Chris wasted no time in having a game of golf with his mate, Rae joined in for a game of pitch and putt golf, we were invited for a game of indoor soccer, lots of country paths to go running and walking on and best of all the cricket started on the TV with the Aussies giving the Windies a good old thrashing.

So after a few weeks of doing basically nothing we really did need to get packing, and we only had a few days to do it all.So we loaded up the new all wheel drive Subaru (more like pack it to the rafters) with many thanks so the kind help of Will Andrew for lending us all his stuff and we promise to take care of it.

We think we have everything that we need, but only time will tell what we have left behind.And with a full tank of petrol we slowly reversed out the Andrew family driveway, waved goodbye, and were off on the first part of our trip around (part) of Australia.