Visit time!

Something I haven’t talked much about is the miserable sand flies we encountered in New Zealand. We know them as black flies at home. The challenge is you don’t always know they’re around and the bite can be minimal for the first day or so, and then, watch out! For Paul, they’re just a bit of an itch for a day or so and then you soon can’t even see where they got you. Unfortunately that is not my experience. After a couple of days, if I have bites on my legs, it feels like they are on fire. The burning is so bad! It usually means a night or two of little sleep. Taking antihistamine pills is how I live (does it even make a difference?) and antihistamine cream just doesn’t seem to help, but we try anyway. The best relief comes from aloe Vera gel, as pure as possible, but its cooling effect is short lived.

I’m in the blister stage right now from New Zealand bites. The good news is we shouldn’t have any problems here – they’re on the west coast only and we aren’t headed that far.

Our drive north up to Canberra was uneventful. A few twisty roads and a very long hill up – several miles. Arriving at what was to be a 4 star motel left me wondering what I had missed in the reviews. She offered a ground floor instead of the second floor. That’s always nice so Paul doesn’t have to carry all the luggage up when there aren’t elevators. We went to our room and I opened the fridge to start loading it. The freezer in this bar fridge was almost completely filled with frost – maybe an inch high space was all I had to get freezer packs in. Then we saw dirt on the towel in the bathroom. We were going to try and defrost some ice with a hairdryer but couldn’t find one.

Off I went to the office – she offered to give us another room – she said they had defrosted a bunch of the fridges upstairs in the last week. She came up with us, that one was almost as bad and no hairdryer again.

She went to get a hair dryer and Paul started checking the rest. He found sticky/dirty dishes so when she returned he showed her. I started on the freezer. She took pictures and said she would’ve talking with the cleaners in the morning. She did offer to run the hair dryer but I said I’d carry on. Between Paul and I we spent about an hour at it and ended up with sheets of ice and about 10 glasses of water before we were done. Meanwhile she brought clean dishes.

That done, we finished unpacking and went down to the park to eat our sandwiches. We picked up a few more groceries and then headed to family friends for dinner.

One of my cousin’s partner is from Australia and his aunt and uncle had invited us for a barbecue. They have a lovely rural property about 40 minutes from Canberra with a couple of alpacas and different species of birds. His aunt raises quail, ducks, numerous varieties of chickens and more. She had some baby quail only a couple of days old.

The served us some steak and kangaroo sausage which is very lean and tasty. She also made us the Australian National Dessert which is the Pavlova. It is a meringue-based dessert with a crisp crust and a soft, marshmallow-like interior, topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit. Since we don’t often have dessert, it was a special treat for us.

We had a lovely visit and after dark headed back to the motel. They warned us we might see kangaroos on the way back and pointed out a location on their property we might see some. Sure enough, we saw quite a few. Kangaroos are most active at dawn and dusk and it was well past dusk.

We drove slowly back to the motel but didn’t have any more kangaroo encounters!