Day 12 - To Adelaide and back!

Well this was a bit unexpected!



You'd remember from our first day that we turned around about five minutes after leaving home to pick up a few things we'd left behind. Well despite our best efforts, over the past two weeks we were slowly but surely collecting a list of things we'd still managed to forget! Despite having made a list and checking it twice (I think, it was all so busy at the end I can't quite be sure what happened!), we'd still managed to overlook a couple of things, as well as discover several other things we hadn't listed but felt we'd need, including a pocket Thesaurus, a couple of kitchen tools and a couple of product samples we found we'd prefer to have on hand for ongoing testing. The damp weather meant we felt we could really benefit from at least part of the caravan annexe we'd originally decided to leave behind, so as to provide some weather protection around the van door. Additionally, some replacement LED globes for the caravan had arrived a day after we left.

So all in all the list of what we needed was growing to the point we felt we would need to ask our kind (and longsuffering!) tenants to send these onto us (they are friends of ours, don't worry!). But the tipping point was when we discovered a product we sell on Amazon had just sold out and we had all the replacement stock at home! It's not a fast mover which is one reason we hadn't noticed it was getting low. We didn't really want to be out of stock for 12 months, but nor did we think it was fair to try to get our tenants to go through the process of labelling and packing for shipment all these products, which, while not highly complex, has several tricky patches if one hasn't done it before. The only option was to do it ourselves.

So about 10am we decided to high-tail it from Cobboboonee National Park all the way back to Adelaide, and back! We considered packing up the van and staying somewhere along the way, but the extra cost of fuel and the slower travel time ruled this out, plus the fact we needed to be in Warrnambool by Friday morning (as I write this) for a doctor's appointment.

Sections of burnt out scrub in
Cobboboonee National Park

The drive back to Adelaide took about 5 1/2 hours. Along the way we went through several patches of forest which had been burnt out at some point. It was a reminder that parts of the country we still plan to see are likely to be pretty badly affected...

Being back in Adelaide, we took the opportunity to drop into a doctor from which Mim was going to get some information sent across to Melbourne. We also had to buy some barcode labels for the products we were sending off to Amazon. So we didn't end up getting 'home' until a bit after 5pm.

We collected all the things we needed, packed up the shipment and booked the courier, and did a couple of small maintenance jobs which had thoughtfully waited until we left to suddenly need doing! By this time it was about 6:30pm and our lovely tenants insisted on us staying for dinner, and was great for the kids to have some other kid company too.

South-eastern Freeway fog

We finally hit the road at about 8:30pm for the journey back to Cobboboonee. It was pretty foggy coming up the South-Eastern Freeway around Crafers. About 1am we stopped off at the Farm near Padthaway to catch 20 minutes' sleep. It was very strange waking up after such a short time, having felt so tired, and being in a different environment. The kids were all a bit disorientated for several seconds when we roused them. But the power-nap gave us enough juice to get back to Cobboboonee via Mt Gambier, where we finally got to bed about 5am!



-- Greg