The estate agents in the UK could learn a thing or two from these guys! I've never been presented with champagne when I went to pick the keys up before.
Completed on the house today! We have bought this house just to let out and are completing on another in mid-January which will eventually be our home. The plan is to let both initially and set off on 'The Big Lap' for a year or so.
Today's one needs a bit of work but we are moving the caravan in to the front garden tomorrow and will live there while we work on the house.
The Lemon Tree Passage Club is right opposite so we popped across the road for a celebratory cool one, and this chap was trotting around the tables. No pigeons in our pub garden, just the odd ibis! Clubs are big in Australia and almost every reasonably sized town has an RSL (Returned Servicemens League). These are equivalent to the British Legion in the UK but far better organised. They have restaurants with reasonably priced food, bar, sports facilities and clubs and the inevitable slot machines. The bigger ones are music venues too. I am still a bit shocked to see sort of betting shops in these clubs, often with an ATM in (to encourage more betting I suppose) and then racks full of leaflets with titles like 'Do you have a gambling problem?' I feel like filling one in saying 'I didn't until I joined your club!'
We are going to try what I suspect will be the impossible this morning (Christmas Eve) and get our internet installed by Telstra in time to Skype my Mum and sister Gill tomorrow. Let's see what they can do otherwise we may have an internet communications blackout for a few days.
Collected our prawns for Christmas lunch today, it will be a strange one this year, camping in the garden of a house we will never actually live in, sweltering in the heat, no turkey, no Paxo, no Pagham pram race and no post Christmas post mortem with the Spooners! Let's hope the sunshine makes up for it.
Merry Christmas everyone xxx
It's been a bit of a slow week because we have been waiting to complete on a house we are buying so have been unable to go far because we need the campsite wifi to get emails. Mind you I have found free wifi in a number of unexpected places, the bank, Bunnings (like Wickes) and various shopping centres and cafes.
Property purchasing works very differently here. Unlike in the UK where all the investigations are carried out before exchange of contracts then, at exchange, a firm completion date is set, here exchange happens very early on in the piece then the searches begin and completion (or settlement as it is called) is not fixed. What seems bizarre to us is that the solicitor or conveyancer has to go to the bank where the vendors have their mortgage armed with cheques to reach final settlement, and our conveyancer has been struggling to get a date for this out of the bank. They have now agreed 23rd December. Why on earth they can't use electronic transfers like the rest of us I can't imagine!
This would all be extremely tricky if we were selling one house and buying another - how do people dovetail it all together? And how do they organise their removals?
Luckily our campsite have squeezed us in for a bit longer, this could have been a problem because all the sites are fully booked for Christmas staring tonight but ours is not completely packed until boxing day and even then they said they will find a bit of grass for us and run a power cable out there if we are still stuck.
Everyone keeps saying how busy this area will get overnight when the Christmas holidays start but I'm finding it hard to imagine. This site is on the Tomaree Peninsula in Anna Bay which has a 32km beach and leads into Nelson Bay and Shoal Bay and all three are resorts with other little beachside towns in between so I suppose it will get busy. The house we are buying is on the Tillygerry Peninsula in Lemon Tree Passage, which is only just up the road but quite a bit quieter. We are off there this afternoon for the Lemon Jam, music and markets on the front. Apparently it is on every month, I hope so!
This is not a job you would want to be doing in 30 degrees!
I'm finding it very difficult to get my head around the Christmas build up here. You would think, as an old retailer, I would be used to getting in to the Christmas spirit from about September, but mid summer is just really strange. I scurried sweltering into a shopping centre last week, looking forward to the air con when I heard 'Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow' singing out all around the mall!
Mind you, it was even odder to see all the Santas and reindeer in the shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur.
However, we are doing our best to feel Christmassy. Ian was missing putting out his lights on the house (yes we have one of those houses usually) so he has now decorated the caravan.
We went to collect Monty from the quarantine station in Melbourne this weekend. His release day was Sunday but we set of Friday lunchtime and stopped for the night in Albury on the NSW/Victoria border, which is where we saw the santa.
Albury is a smart, reasonably sized town and we checked into a motel attached to a pub which was pretty busy as many young farmers from outlying areas come into the town for the weekend. There were girls dressed up to the nines drinking bright green drinks and hoping to attract the attention of these chaps but they only seemed interested in sticking together and gambling. I was astonished to discover that Australian pubs, clubs and RSLs have rows and rows of slot machines and usually a betting shop area. Austalians would bet on how long it was going to take a fly to drown in their soup!
Anyway, we set off next morning for Melbourne and finally found the quarantine station in a grotty little place called Spotwood. Monty was due out at 9.30am the next day so we found a campsite in a place called Werribee. It was very much like Norfolk, very flat with fields of cabbages. It also had a touch of the Yiewsleys about it, my Chantry colleagues will know what I mean - lots of very fat women with home drawn tattoos.
It was quite a nice spot to watch boats coming in from fishing trips though and there was a beautiful sunset.
We finally collected Monty who seemed none the worse for
his adventure.
Visited Tomaree National Park this morning and climbed up to the summit of Tomaree Head to take in all around views of Port Stephens.
It was swelteringly hot but well worth the effort.
On the way back we stopped off at Stockton Beach which is a 60km long beach running from Anna Bay to Newcastle. It has massive sand dunes like mountains and you can 4WD or camel ride along the beach or quad bike up and down the dunes.
Signed contracts on a house in Lemon Tree Passage today. It needs a little bit of attention but once we have fixed it up a bit, we will be letting it out to fund our big trip around Australia. We are hoping to complete by 17th December so we can move out of Bays Holiday Park and into our own garden. Bays has been a great place to stay but it will be good to stop paying for accommodation.
We have been doing a bit more exploring and have tried out the local buses, which only run every hour or so during the day but take such complicated routes to serve some of the tinier communities around here, it is worth the wait because they take you to place you would not have noticed.
By doing this we discovered Oyster Bay, Little and Big Swan Bays and best of all, Mallabula beach front where a boardwalk through the Tilligerry Habitat starts. After yet another fruitless search for koalas I saw a bandicoot!
After scanning the trees constantly for a week we finally saw these little guys, we are supposed to be in an area bristling with koalas but they appear to be quite good at hiding.
Now that we are living more comfortably in our caravan we are concentrating on searching for a house and have been to see several in Lemon Tree Passage and have put an offer on one, hoping to exchange contracts on Monday. It needs a bit of work then we will be letting it while we go on our Big Lap.
Received the good news yesterday that Monty has arrived safe and sound in Melbourne. Apparently he travelled well and we can pick him up on 14th December.
We struck it lucky with the caravan. Having looked online for months before we came, we were resigned to the fact that an offroad caravan was not going to be an easy thing to find and we might have to travel some distance to get what we wanted.
Then we checked the other night and found exactly what we wanted only 15km from where we are staying.
It was so nice to be able to unpack all our cases at last and to sleep in a proper bed. We are really glad we have it tonight as, after a blisteringly hot day we are in the middle of a big storm, not a night to be in a tent.
We have decided this is the area we want to stay in and have been looking at houses in Lemon Tree passage, which is a little township in Port Stephens. It is quieter than the other towns, which are more holiday resorts but within easy striking distance of all they have to offer.
Below are pictures of Nelson Bay which is the biggest town on the peninsula, we were just strolling along there last Sunday when two dolphins swam past.
