Since we moved into this house, most of our time has been spent working on the outside and hopefully you can see from the before and after photos that it has come on a bit. I have been concentrating on developing a garden while Ian has focused on making the place easier to get around.
Our block is like the foothills of the Himalayas and he has just completed a fourth flight of steps just to reach the top of the back garden from the house while I am starting from the bottom making a path which will eventually reach them.
We try to use recycled materials as much as possible and were delighted to find over 1000 second hand pavers for the path on Gumtree for a fraction of the retail price. Although the monetary saving was huge, we have only just started to recover from the aching muscles gained from four 76km round trips loading and unloading what felt like millions of pavers. We started the whole exercise at 8am and finished unloading the final car and trailer full at 7pm - truly knackered.
We never learn though and have decided now to embark on our most ambitious project to date - to fill in the underside of the house with an extra lounge, bedroom, shower and toilet, laundry, office and workshop. It is common in Australia to build a pole house like ours when dealing with a steep slope as it is the cheapest method and makes the most of any views but you can see from the pictures the area underneath is huge and wasted at the moment. So we are resurrecting Bodgit and Scarper Builders and jumping in feet first!
The architect came last week to draw the plans and a surveyor arrived to take lots of mysterious measurements on Saturday so we can obtain planning permission. Ian has to take an online Owner/Builder's qualification and, once the development approval arrives, off we go.
Hopefully this will all come together so we can do the bulk of the work in winter for a change, we usually forget to take this into account and do all the heavy work while sweltering in the summer heat like proper pommies to the amusement of our neighbours.
The weather has been on everyone's minds here at the moment because, in some areas, we are experiencing the hottest summer for 120 years. If you thought the British were obsessed with talking about the weather you should come and hear the Australians!
Unlike the British however, Australians are expected to be experts. There are no helpful little clouds, suns and lightning bolts on our weather forecasts to aid our understanding. We are expected to know all about el nino and are battered with meteorological terms like trops, lows, highs and radar maps which look very pretty but are tricky to decipher without some formal training.
Conversations in the supermarket or petrol station all start with references to the heat/cold/rain and everyone has an opinion on what is going to happen next. 'There is a cool change coming' - 'I can feel a storm approaching'. In spite of all this expertise, the whole country is taken completely by surprise by sudden weather events on a surprisingly regular basis!
To be fair, we do have some big weather here. No drizzle or light breezes for us, if there is wind or rain, it is proper wind or rain. At the moment inland areas of New South Wales are struggling along in over 40 degree temperatures while, in the Northern Territory, some communities are cut off by flooding.
The series of incredibly hot days was expected to come to a head on Sunday with the biggest worry being fire. Fire is in the back of the minds of all Australians in the summer months and every town has designated safe areas which are usually big open spaces away from trees and buildings. There are other concerns too when it is this hot it is important to keep hydrated and to do as little as possible. Our local swimming pool sent text messages and put up facebook posts saying they would stay open until 8pm each evening until the heatwave ended but most people choose to stay indoors with the air conditioning on full blast. This then places huge pressure on the power supply and, if there is a fire, power is needed to work water pumps because the water pressure drops as soon as every household switches on their hoses at once. A dilemma, I am sure you will agree. The New South Wales government dealt with this by ordering that Tomago Aluminium switched off their smelter during the hottest hours for 3 consecutive days. The smelter uses a staggering 10% of NSW power!
The fire danger, which usually hovers around moderate to high at this time of year, was predicted to be catastrophic in our area (Hunter on the map). Everyone in the areas expected to be affected received a series of text messages telling us to be ready to take action or evacuate, we were also called on our landlines. Although this was obviously a helpful strategy in many ways, it threw some elderly people living alone into a panic thinking they had to evacuate straight away. Added to this the NSW fire chief appeared on the news on Saturday night with a very scary speech about how Sunday was expected to bring the most catasrophic conditions seen in living memory, which did leave us thinking we were all going to die!
I am in two minds about the warnings because most fires are started deliberately and I think it gives people ideas, indeed two men have already been arrested this weekend for setting fires on purpose, they were 32 and 40 years old - not kids! However, the reason for all the warnings was, added to the extreme heat, there were very strong winds due to arrive in the late afternoon which is the worst possible combination for the firefighters.
Unfortunately the predictions came true with 97 fires burning at one point across the state. The little township of Uarby was almost completely destroyed. At one point the firefighters were battling in 47 degree heat against 90km per hour winds and 75% of the houses along with much of the livestock were lost.
There were no fires near us this time although we could smell one which was about 40km away, but we were again reminded how brave our firefighters are. They are almost all volunteers and it is thanks to them that, yet again, no human lives were lost. I'll leave you with some pix of our local firies with the cakes a couple of little boys made for them.
Another 6am start, this time to meet up with Zoe and Shaun on the Clyde Coast. They had borrowed Shaun's Mum's motorhome and originally planned to drive up to Byron Bay then stop with us on their way back. However, by the time they reached Bateman's Bay they realised this would be taking on a bit too much driving and asked us to meet them instead.
This gave us one day to book a caravan park which accepted dogs in the busiest week of the year on one of the most popular stretches of coast in the country. Not much of a challenge there then!
Unfortunately, even if the sites had availability and were listed as dog friendly, they generally won't take dogs in the peak holiday season and the kennels were not an option as we were trying to do all of this on a Sunday and they were closed.
Amazingly, after about ten rejections, we hit lucky with the Kioloa Beach Caravan Park who not only had two pitches available but welcomed dogs with open arms.
We were anticipating a dreadful journey as nearly all Australians are on holiday around this period but it was plain sailing all the way to Milton, which was less than 50km from our destination. Milton is a very pretty little town on the Princes Highway which creates a huge bottleneck during the holiday season, I imagine it can't be much fun to stay there because every time you ventured out of the town you would have to join the hour long queue to get back in again. Anyway we got through and eventually arrived at Kioloa Beach (nobody knows how to pronounce it, even the locals don't seem to agree).
The Clyde Coast is fascinating. If you follow the link you will see that the locals are very proud to have no McDonalds, KFC, poker machines, cinemas, 5 star hotels, betting shops or big supermarkets. It was great, very refreshing. Internet was non existent and it was only possible to get a phone signal if you stood on the boat ramp or by the 50km sign on the road out of Kioloa but this all added to the fun.
The campsite was very busy but had plenty of shower blocks, a large pool and was surprisingly quiet at night with kangaroos and wombats moving into the site after dark. Once we had met up with Zoe and Shaun we went to explore and found it was situated on a fabulous beach. This whole stretch of coast turned out to be a series of glorious, dog friendly beaches.
We had a wonderful few days walking in the woods, where we stumbled across kangaroos and goannas, wandering along the beach, and chilling by the pool. The campsite even put on a dog show including a dog fancy dress competition (the dog in the picture is not Monty). Eventually we said our goodbyes and Zoe and Shaun headed south for home while we wandered north on our way back.
The journey home took us through Robertson, home of the Big Potato and Moss Vale where we stopped for the night at the showground. Moss Vale obviously used to be nice but it is now in two halves. One end of town is well kept with lovely buildings while the other looks very down at heel.
There were many empty shops and it turned out to be impossible to find anywhere to eat so we cooked back at the caravan and left the following morning. As we drove through the neighbouring town of Bowral (birthplace of Don Bradman) we could see where the money previously spent in Moss Vale was going. It was an extremely prosperous looking place, maybe we will stay there next time, I'm sure Ian would like to visit the Don Bradman Museum.
