The best laid plans...

Well to be fair to anyone following this adventure I guess I'd better put in the crappy stuff as well as the great bits. We were not long out of Canberra on Saturday the 21st of Feb when we came to our first (and never to be forgotten) weight station at a lovely little stop called Murulan. We pulled in thinking "great, this should take about 5 mins" and ended up wasting about an hour after the lovely man told us the trailer was not satisfactory to carry our 4WD and could not legally be taken any further. Major bummer!! I will leave out all the hair pulling details, suffice to say that our only option to get us out of there was for Deb and Laura to jump into the Jimny and to follow Chris and Will in the bus. Luckily the bus was big enough that it wasn't easy to lose, but it wasn't nice to think that we were heading thru' Sydney with 1 map (in the bus) and 1 mobile phone (with me) and that if I did lose chris I would have no way to communicate with him!! ARRRHH! The other problem we had was driving thru' a very busy little town trying to find a guy in Hornsby (just out of Sydney) to try to get the trailer load limit changed. I almost had a nervous breakdown and was so glad to see Chris finally give up and head for the highway (while we were all still in one piece). We made it that night to a 24hr servo just out of Newcastle and boy had we earned out bourbon that night!

After sleeping on it we had made a definate decision to head to Lismore so the next day was solid driving (with a few well earned sanity breaks in between). The kids were wonderfully behaved, considering the general mood at times was a little low. But having said that, we were still glad to be on our way and the scenery was great. Haven't seen so much green grass in ages.

On the morning of Monday 23rd Feb we drove into Lismore Palms Caravan Park and made our first official working stop of the trip. Well of course as yet there is no actual work but we are getting there. And the thinking about it sure does work up a sweat! Makes you appreciate the daily dip in the pool, even tho' I think some days only a Victorian would see it as warm enough!