Rockhampton

Rockhampton has been my home town since we moved from the mining town, Moranbah, where my Dad worked, which was in 1986. I continued my high school studies there and a have lived the majority of my life since then in Rockhampton. Witj plans of moving not only from Rockhampton, but to another country, I couldn’t help but be a little sad at leaving the town. That said, Rocky will be easy to leave in some ways, especially for the travels we have planned and our future life in The Netherlands. I will miss the people I have been associated with from school, work and the friends I and we have made. The weather I will surely miss, although the idea of months of daytime temperatures of 35 degrees plus can be daunting, I do enjoy them. I’m not particularly looking forward to the near freezing conditions that await us when we get to Meppel, in Holland. Trish on the other hand will feel differently, and I can understand as who really w ats to spend X-mas eating hot meats in 35 degree plus weather.

Leaving the house we renovated is hard, and trying to fit our belongings into our car is even harder. The room we moved into at the caravn park for our last few day in Rocky is only small, it has two small bedrooms, one with a double bed and the other with two bunk beds. It has a small lounge and dinign area and a small kitchen. It also has a bathroom including toilet, so it has everything we need for a few days. We tried to fit about 4 car loads of our belongings into this already cramped space and then we had to spend some time reducing this amount down to one car load for our trip around Australia.

We didn’t quite mange this and although we had our car absolutely full, we still had to leave some things behind.

The car we have is a Ford Falcon Station Wagon, which is quite a large car, for comparison for people from Europe it is similar in size toi an Opel Omega and has a 6 cylinder 4.0 litre engine. In this car we have fitted the following, 3 suitcases, a duffle bag, two jerry cans (20 litre, one with water, one with petrol – some of the parts of Australia we are driving through are very remote and we will sometimes travel 500 kilometres between petrol stations, so the fuel is just in case), small suitcase, large container for food (80 litre), esky or cool box (65 Litre), pram, walker, two backpacks, small box with baby items, a box of nappies, a box of other items, first aid box, laptop, picnic set, camp chairs x 3, and a lot of other assorted things. Needless to say I virtually have to push and shove to fit everything in. It will get less as we progress around the country and we will be taking less again overseas. Anyway the trip starts in the morning tomorrow and first stop is Moranbah, where I grew up.