Wanderung 26

Walkabout, Sailabout

March - May 2012


 

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Saturday, April 14th, 2012: From Canberra, ACT to Sydney, New South Wales

Bob:

Karen had left her car at Jeffie's place, so our first task after breakfast was to drive over so she could retrieve it. Then Karen led us safely out of the maze of Canberra streets and showed us the road North before honking and waving good-bye. I was sad to see her go, but she did after all have to get back to work and earn a living and we had to get up to Sydney to see Neville and Lyn and ultimately catch our ship, so there was no help for it. But we don't get to see our Australian friends that often, and thus it is particularly hard to say "Good-bye".

On our way up to the Hume Highway we detoured over to a "cellar door" that Jeffie had recommended and bought a couple bottles of wine to take back home. Unfortunately, the vintner had run out of the sparkling wines that Jeffie had recommended, but we bought a couple of others that seemed to us to be very nice, high quality wines. But then we had to hustle back North and continue on to Sydney.

Monika:

Time for the last stretch of our trip, the drive from Canberra to Hornsby on the north side of Sydney. We had a last wonderful breakfast with Karen, said Good-Bye to "the boys", her two small dogs, and were on our way. Last night Karen had left her car parked at Jeffie's place, so this morning we drove her over to her car, and she guided us on our way out of town. I was glad I did not have to navigate through Canberra. I guess once you know the city it would be easy, but for strangers it is confusing. Basically, there are several ring roads with the Parliament area as the center and streets radiating out from it like spokes on a wheel. If you know which spoke to take it is easy, but I find it very confusing. Maybe in a few more visits I will be comfortable.

Jeffie had suggested we visit a very nice vineyard near Lake George where she had purchased some great wines. We found the correct turnoff for Lark Hill vineyard and stopped briefly at their Cellar Door. I sampled a couple of wines and we bought a very nice Riesling and an Auslese, a sweet after-dinner wine, to take along.

Back on the road we passed Lake George, a rather large lake that last time we drove by was completely dry. This time it actually did have some water in it, attesting to the fact that the long drought that had afflicted Australia for almost ten years, was actually over.

Bob:

Driving American Interstates, German Autobahns, English Motorways and Italian Autostrada has generally turned out to be boring for me, and the Australian motorway to Sydney was no exception. The landscape was basically interesting and certainly changed during that stretch, but we didn't pass through towns and the road itself was deadly dull. Certainly if I had not have been intent on getting up to Sydney as quickly as possible to spend some time with Neville and Lyn, I would have gotten off that dingbat road and meandered on the two-lane roads up to Sydney, along the lines of what we did in Wanderung 22. Once when I got bored out of my skull and we had to purchase petrol, we exitted the motorway and contined on the parallel highway to see a small town along the way. I was rewarded for this brief excursion by seeing an absolutely huge statue of a merino sheep, which is the breed that is apparently raised in that locality.

Monika:

At Goulborne where the Federal Highway out of Canberra meets the Hume Highway to Sydney, we stopped for gas at a Shell Station with a gigantic Merino sheep statue. I guess we were back in sheep country. We drove through the nice little town and back onto the Hume Highway. This highway is not exactly limited access, but does not go through any towns and is marked 110 km/h so it was a fast way to go. Since it was a Saturday there were hardly any trucks on the road which made driving a bit better.

We had planned to stop for lunch on the highway, but when we pulled into a rest area I did not see a restaurant so we pulled on out hoping to find something a little later. But soon after that we went onto a true interstate and finally even onto a toll road with no more opportunities to stop. The toll road actually bypassed Sydney to the West, so we did not have to drive through the downtown area and over the harbor bridge. The toll roads only accepted transponders like the EZ Pass back home, but fortunately our car was equipped with one although I'm sure the toll will ultimately be charged to our credit card!

Bob:

We arrived at Neville and Lynn's place in Hornsby about 2:00 p.m., and I was really tired of driving by the point, so after we unpacked the car I gladly drove over to the Avis car rental agency and dropped it off. Then we had just a very pleasant afternoon and evening of chatting non-stop with our friends from Wanderungs 12 and 20. Always nice to renew old friendships, in my opinion, and they had done everything from taking a cruise across the Pacific Ocean to having new grandchildren to talk about. Since our cruise was going to land at some of the same islands they had visited, we could get the inside information on those.

Conversely, since they were going to take a North Atlantic crossing in the late Summer/early Fall period, we could give them some information about ports in Iceland and Greenland that we had visited on our previous cruises. We also planned what to do when they visited us in Northern Virginia, and that was fun because really our visit was way too short. I had wanted to finally meet their daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren who live North of Sydney, but with our time-compressed visit that was just impossible, regrettably. We finally pulled the plug on the conversation and managed to get to bed sometime after 11:00 p,.m., as I recall, and I dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Monika:

By the time we got off the toll road Bob was getting really tired and hungry, besides we needed to fill the car up one last time. So we stopped at a gas station that said it had sandwiches. Well they did, but they did not have place to sit down inside. So we sat on a wall outside to enjoy our sandwich while Bob rested up a bit. Luckily it was only another 20 minutes or so to get to Lynn and Neville's place. Lynn had given me very detailed direction on how to get to the garage in their apartment and it worked like a charm.

We unpacked the car and then took it down to the Avis place which was only a couple of blocks from their apartment. Our lease actually went till tomorrow morning, but we were glad to get rid of the car. The place itself was already closed, but they had a place to leave the key, so that's what we did.

We had a very nice afternoon and evening with Lynn and Neville. I define "good friends" as those, that even if you have not seen them for a while, you pick up as if you just had said good bye the day before. Well Lynn and Neville as well as Karen definitely fall into this category. So we just kept chatting away. Lynn offered me the use of her washer and dryer and with her help, I got all our dirty clothes washed and most of them dried before we finally went to bed.



Copyright 2012 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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Prolog Map of Drive in Australia Map of Transpacific Cruise

March 2012
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11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
April 2012
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8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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