Caravanning Across Australia!

Our Deluxe Camper Van Ready to Rock n RollThanks to a couple of Parisians we met in Tokyo, we started to think seriously about just driving around Australia and as one thing led to another, we just rented a caravan, which is basically a mini RV complete with a running water sink, microwave, fridge, bed and cooking equipment. It's a mobile camper that lets us drive to where we want, when we want. We're going to head out Wednesday to a campsite near Sydney in the north for at least three nights there. There's an Opal Festival in the middle of nowhere that we'll have more on later.

The weather has been cool but really beautiful during the day, then much colder at night. So we're thinking of moving north for a little while then south again towards Melbourne and perhaps skip over to Tasmania. We have our little home on wheels until September 10th, when we dropped off in Darwin, in "the NT" as the call the Northern Territory.

The eight days here have been very relaxing. It's rained off and on but overall the middle of winter in Sydney is very mild. We've walked around with light jackets most days.

Photos Taken Near Our Apartment in Sydney

This is near Clovelly (Sydney), Australia, where our apartment is located as we walked back from the town of Coogee. Click on the small image to see it full size.

Bird Watches the Bay

Our Sydney Apartment

Our first place in Sydney has been a nice first-floor apartment in the small neighborhood of Clovelly, near the end of Thorpe Street, just a few steps to the cliffs of Gordon's Bay and up from the little town of Coogee. Trying to figure out where to stay before we arrived in Sydney was a challenge because we'd put off that decision for after our arrival in Tokyo. We discovered a website called Airbnb.com that Rowan had actually heard about while visiting San Francisco and because our standard fallback of Vacation Rentals by Owner did't have anything, we used Airbnb.

Given the lateness of deciding, we did not have a lot of choices and the one place that was downtown in a high-rise apartment complex sort of strung us along until we had to give up and cast our net wider.  We were glad we did because the CBD (Central Business District as they call the downtown Down Under) was too much of Just Another City and not fun enough (after we finally did see it). We're glad we chose this more folksy neighborhood because it was easy to get into the CBD with the excellent bus system of Sydney. The hotels are expensive and the exchange rate knocks off about 12% of our spending power (it used to be much better) so even the $964 (US Dollars) we spent for 8 nights here was a comparatively good deal. We could've spent much more.

Click on the image to view a larger version. (Seriously, now you can click on the image to view a larger version!)

The lower part of this building is our place.

Front living room looking towards the kitchen (on the left) and front (blue door)

Kitchen (left) and Blue Front  

The Bedroom with hard-to-find queen-sized bed.Modern Bath with Step-In Shower Tub

Trip from Our Apt to Imperial Palace

The video here represents us leaving our apartment in Shinsen, going on the subway, and arriving at the East Garden of the Imperial Palace. In realtime it took one hour and fifteen minutes. I sped it up 2000% for a runtime of three and a half minutes.

We ended up at a nice garden. Here is a beautiful tree on the mound where the video ends up:

And next to that were some more trees and flowers. Japan has a lot of nice landscaping...

Final Days Before Departure

The cats are in preparation mode - Cairo in a hotel waiting to fly to Pennsylvania to her new home with Elizabeth and Don.

Macha is watching Chakra help Rowan pack.

Macha is getting in a box to go with us.

The storage unit (one of two, the other being very full) is getting the last of our things for a year and a half.

Dropping Off the Cars to Sell After We LeaveAnd the cars are both ready to be sold by Daniel at International Fine Automotive in Culver City

And the coup-de-grace is Jennifer, our next-dor neighbor, who is being "Auntie Jenni-fur" for Macha and Chakra for as long as we are gone.  Thanks, Jennifer!!!