Empty nest again

My brother and sister in law just left to go back to Melbourne. It is such a long drive, but I almost think they will be better off in an a/c car than outside today. They have forecast over 40° C in Melbourne and up to 45° in Mildura. It will probably be hot here too, but there always seem to be a bit of a breeze so even though we don't have a/c it stays relatively cool if you open the windows on both sides to let the air through.

Speaking of a/c, since we are now in January I really have to get going finding another house. We don't need a three-story house with 300 square meters to clean (or more often, not).

Tomorrow is going to be terrible in regards to  bush fires. Right now there are 95 fires burning across New South Wales. In Wagga Wagga it was +45° today. Sydney will have 40° tomorrow, and all National Parks will be closed. It is in the middle of people's vacation and many people are out and about, so I guess they have to have strict safety measures like that.

Well, have you made any New Year's resolutions then?  If not you can get some ideas here. Good luck with that!

Fruit Galore

We are such idiots! We really should know better by now!  I am referring to the fact that every time before we travel I look around the kitchen and decide to pack up all the left-over fruit that we could snack on on the trip. Usually it gets packed away in the back of the car so we can't reach it and it doesn't get eaten. So what happens then is you get to the border to another state, in this case Victoria,  and you see this sign.

So "waste not, want not" and all that, we set about eating the two bananas, four tomatoes, punnet of strawberries, but had to finally throw the cherries away. This incident happened in a small place called Galore hence the title of this blog.

Now you think we should have gotten the message by now, but no, the next day driving through beautiful citrus-fruit orchards near Mildura and also seeing THE BIG ORANGE, we got tempted into buying a large bag of oranges. And yet again another state border to cross, this time into South Australia. So just before entering we had to stop and gorge ourselves on oranges. We even lured some Swiss tourists into having two each as well. It was very lucky we did because at the border our car was searched for fruit so they clearly take this very seriously.

I met these two cute girls sitting on the river bank of the Murray in Mildura. I had just read that a young boy had been eaten by a crocodile somewhere in Australia, and I innocently asked the girls if there were crocodiles in this river. They giggled upproariously and shook their heads, no. I guess it was a stupid question, especially since later I saw groups of families swimming in the river. I still worry about the sharks and the spiders and the snakes and the crocodiles and the jellyfish, I can't help it.