Happy New Year!

Hello everyone, hope you all had a lovely Christmas and fab New Year celebrations.

Again, bit of a delay since the last blog so lots of news to catch-up on……………

In the last week we have covered over 2100 km………..the van is doing us proud, James has done loads of work on it so it looks and runs about 100 times better than when we bought it!!! We set off from Sydney on Friday 22^nd December at 12.30 am driving through the night to Melbourne, in total it was about 12 hours driving time, but we had quite a few rest stops, so we arrived in Melbourne about 5pm on the Saturday. We took the Hume Highway, not a particularly exciting drive, but it’s quicker than the coastal route. We spent Christmas in Melbourne at Richard and Jill’s, along with Mike, Sarah and Wozza, had a totally great time, thanks guys. In true Aussie style we had a super deluxe BBQ on Christmas day, but there wasn’t much sunshine to go with it, in fact it rained!!!!! Didn’t matter though, we were too full to care! On Christmas Eve we had taken a trip to the South Melbourne Market and bought A LOT of food, so Christmas day scran involved oysters, king prawns, red snapper, blue-eyed cod, kangaroo, numerous salads, a rather impressive cheese plate and tiramisu (we also had our fair share of beer and wine too!). YUM.

Boxing day took us to the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) (along with 100,000 other people!) to see the first day of the fourth Ashes test match, again the weather wasn’t great, but it was worth it to sample the atmosphere and see Shane Warne score his 700^th wicket, Flintoff and Pieterson bat, and the barmy army, who are truly barmy indeed.

Then on the 27^th we set off to meet Nicole and Tali, who also have a camper van (Toyota Hiace for those of you in the know) so we could travel in convoy up the south coast back to Sydney stopping at a few campsites on the way. Had an awesome time and it is a gorgeous route, really picturesque with some cute little seaside towns. Definitely going to do that route again as there are so many things to see! Our first stop was in Womboyn, to get to the campsite we had to drive down a track avoiding kangaroos! Then we spent two nights at a beautiful campsite on Pebbly Beach, which is not far from a popular holiday town called Bateman’s Bay (Its good enough for Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban anyway, we shopped alongside them in the supermarket there!!!). Pebbly beach has kangaroos, various parrots and possums galore, amazing. Again the weather wasn’t great, but it saved the rain for nighttime and we still managed to go for walks and swim in the sea.

So it was back to Sydney for New Year’s Eve fireworks. They were brilliant, incredible to watch, and the main show lasted for nearly 20 mins, there was also an earlier family show at 9pm, which last for about 10 mins. I read somewhere that 3000 kg of explosives were launched into the sky!!!! We watched them from a park on Cremorne Point which overlooks the Sydney harbour. People start pitching their picnic places from early in the morning in order to get a good spot to view the show, crazy, but there were some very organized people with tents, gazebos, BBQs….etc!! We got there late afternoon, but managed to find a place to sit and picnic, even though it was already packed. Despite it being very busy, there was a really great atmosphere, everyone was having fun, some aided by quite a lot of alcoholic beverages!!!!!

The two weeks previous to Christmas were spent in Sydney. We have now moved back to Collaroy for some beach side living and are house sitting for Soph, Richard and Joel until the end of January while they are in the UK for 7 weeks attending to the small matter of getting married. Hope all the preparations are going well guys. GOOD LUCK. Massive thanks again to Helen and Al for letting us stay in Cremorne with them for 4 weeks, very much appreciated, you stars.

Also, I have been working since mid-December. I have a couple of part-time jobs, one working in a coffee shop in Cremorne in the mornings (6.30 am start, yikes, but getting up early seems to be easier here!), and the other working in a cool restaurant on the shores of Lake Narrabeen, about 10 mins walk from here. So I was quite busy before Christmas earning some spends. James had an interview at a car place called SupaCheap Auto ( a result of going in there lots to buy stuff for the van!), so he’ll hopefully be working there part-time throughout January.

So that’s the update for now, more soon…………..check out the new photos under the “our photos” link.

Hope everyone is well, and all the best for 2007, hope it’s a great year.

Take care,

Jude and James

xxxx