We are in Blairgowrie, it is Saturday. Didn't plan on doing much today, a day for catching up with emails etc. Have managed to steal Chris's internet connection while he is at golf. Jane drove us to the market as she was going there herself, and that was enjoyable. We quite like markets, mainly food produce and quite cheap which is even more important.

Our van is pretty much sorted now, in fact we seem to be travelling in a compressed form of luxury. We have had a spare battery installed in the back of the van and we have purchased a box which gives us 240w power so we can run our laptop (very important) and camera batteries, mobiles, cooler and anything else we desire really all from the comfort of our own bus. The battery lets us know when it needs re-charging again so we don't have to have it on everyday. And we have tried it all out and to charge the battery again it only takes 30minutes so when we are driving even around town its perfect. Also we had a great find... we were out looking for various bits and bobs at the local shops when in the car park Danny asked this young chap if he would like to sell his roof rack. He did so we offered him $100. He seemed overly impressed with this figure so we dropped it down and managed to buy his roof rack for $76. Its not just two bars either, its an actual cage type one so we have secured our spare jerry cans up there and when we find ourselves some cheap bikes they will live up there also. So onto this roof rack we have built ourselves a shower. Very simple really. A 4metre 100mm thick piece of plastic piping secured to the side of the roof rack. And on each end there is an elbow glued on. One end has a screw cap so to use for filling with water and also releasing the pressure when we turn the tap on which we drilled in to the other end. This pipe holds about 50L of water and warms up in the sun. Our very own solar shower. We will definitely be grateful for this when driving in the outback and all the places in between. Very happy with this! Our van, Sheila, broke down on us the other day. We were driving to meet Matt, the man we bought the roof rack from for a drink when on the way the temperature went right up to the red. We pulled over, it was dark so we couldn't really see anything. We turned back home which is really only a 10min drive away but of course we had to keep pulling over every 2 minutes to allow Sheila to cool down for 10 minutes. It took us almost 2 hours to get home. And of course this all happened to be on the night when Chris and Jane had gone to Melbourne for the evening to watch Louden Wainwright in concert. In the light of day next morning we took a look at the van and the fan belt had been twisted off. We crawled to the garage 5 minutes down the road (luckily) and a very friendly Doug sorted us out. It materialised that the fan belt was in fact an air conditioning belt. Some bloody dumbass had put the wrong belt on at some point. Anyway to get Sheila fixed it cost $60. Phew! (We of course took this that Sheila knew she had the wrong belt on and was trying to warn us before we drove her into the middle of the outback). She is all fixed and our plans are back on track. We have started to search for work. But as we said we are Saturday and so have to wait until Monday morning (early!) to ring round the local wineries. We think that by the end of next week we will be working. This we plan to do for about 2-3 weeks before heading onto Canberra along the coast.

Lots of love to everyone xxxxxxx