Hi ho folks.

We'll, as you may have noticed from the pin in the map we are on the move. We dragged our feet down the east coast but as things got more populated and cooler we picked up the pace a bit. Stops in Bonny Hills where we, taking an unpowered campsite got to park in front of everyone else and had only a bit of lawn in front of us before our beautiful panoramic ocean view. Seal Rocks where we chatted with a 75 year old couple that were just so neat and interesting and adventurous - they still surf at their age!!! We stopped in at a Koala hospital where they nurse the cute little suckers back to health after all manner of injuries and ailments. We've been trying to spot them in the wild but since they're nocturnal it's hard to see them during the day as they hardly move in the trees. Spotting them was best described to us as "look for the grey soccer ball high up in the leaves".

We had planned to bypass Sydney for now as we'll spend lots of time there as we're trying to sell our van prior to departure, however, I was expecting some mail from my sister. We did our homework and just "popped" into Sydney to pick up my mail at the post office. As we've learned, one does not "pop" into a city of 4.2 million people. After creeping through traffic (even on a Saturday morning) for 2 hours, paying $3 to drive over the harbour bridge, $2 to park for an hour, and a further $3 in toll roads to leave we also paid $13 to request that the mail get forwarded to Melbourne. You see, the Poste Restante service is not open on Saturdays anymore, despite what our guidebook says. Good thing our relationship is like a rock and that we had 3 days of desert driving to work out any kinks. If, however, you've ever received a letter & possibly newspaper clipping with accompanying cutting commentary care package from my sister you'll know that this was all really a small price to pay. She's got the market cornered in this service.

The night after the Sydney episode we stopped just outside of Canberra, ready to pounce on the nations capital the next day. We had chosen a camp spot quite out of the way and were looking forward to a good nights sleep. When we pulled up we were surprised to see quite a few people at the camp spot but thought that perhaps this was a popular local weekend spot. As we drove into the Meelee we realised what was going on. We had landed ourselves into the middle of a Huskie/Malamut dog convention. The yipping and barking was deafening. 'Ain't nothin' queer as folk' as the saying goes. Why Australians convene to race these sorts of dogs around this dusty forest on homemade carts I don't know.

Canberra was visited on a fairly blustery day, but since it was mostly national museums and galleries that we were shooting for, that suited us fine. The city was purpose built as the capital so it's got all of these grandiose roadways with boulevards the size of parks in between 8 lanes of traffic. The road system there could easily handle a population 3 times its size which also made it feel like a ghost town. This city was even less pedestrian friendly than the others we've visited simply due to the distances between anything in the city.

The first of 3 days of desert driving had us in Wagga Wagga in the middle of a dust storm. You couldn't even talk normally outside as you'd choke on the dust in the air and you should have seen Max. Covered in dust that had mixed with a light rain.

I'll leave the really interesting details about our visit to the town of Hay (in the shire of Hay) out of this entry as you can fill in the details about what it has to offer. It was...amazing as you can imagine.

The change from humid coastline to desert hasn't been kind to us and our skin and noses have suffered severely. We got so desperate that we started spreading our Extra Virgin Olive oil all over each other to heal our crawling skin. This was both extremely soothing and mildly erotic and helped to make our skin look like we were under 50 once again.

This brings us to Tanunda which is in the Barossa Valley where we've reunited with our friend Thomas once again. Great to see a familiar face again and to visit the vineyards and fantastic coffee shops, bakeries and cheese vendors. We've found a cultured pocket of Australians here and we're clinging to them for dear life.

OK, I've bored you all enough for this go.

Love to all from the road,

Jason, Barbara & Thomas