No wife, no horse, no moustache.

Hi friends!

I miss you. A lot. But I am absolutely in love with Melbourne atm too.
It's a place I have always liked a lot, but I've never been there with my H-man before, nor have I ever been able to stay at my sisters beautiful home :)
This is really a visit to treasure, and maybe even a visit to turn into a full-time visit....? Possible? I don't know :)

Today we rode our bikes into the city and went to 'City on a hill' church, in Hoyts at Melbourne Central. (wonder if many church goers have done the dirty and snuck into a movie afterwards... sinsinsin :P) We met some really sincere people there, none of those cheesy church meet'n'greets. And really enjoyed the message. It was all about the prodigal son, and I kept imagining Greg Malavey (our Moruya family dad) as the father in the story (he is a good good man).
Then we went to an amazing exhibition at the state library, called "Look!", showcasing Australian childrens book illustrators. (if joengstrom reads this- you should CHECK THIS OUT!!)
If you go to the following url there is a list of little vids with each artist, showing how they work their magic. I found some of them really inspiring.
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/node/3148
The we went to Degraves Espresso and ate a special Anniversary lunch and road our bikes home, via way too many want-to-buy-the-whole-shop book stores...
Might go back with some cash later... (cash that i should really give back to the bank... hmm)

SO. GOOD NEWS- made it all the way from Moruya to Melbourne with NO car trouble!!! :D
Can't contain my joy over that!
It is amazing to have it all fixed.
And after 3 loooong mechanic visits, and a couple of thousand dollars, it turns out that the problem was a teeny tiny screw that told the engine how hard to work.
Sounds simple, and I'm no mechanic (obviously), but the engine is a bit of a slow starter, especially when it's cold out, and apparently a previous owner had done some d.i.y. so that the engine would work REAL hard to start, and start first time all the time :) Sounds like a good idea, right?
But the problem with that was that when the engine should have been relaxing, it was still trying it's little butt off to keep starting the engine. Kind of like it was constantly trying to start, even when it was cruising. Hence all the overheating and bad behavior :D

Just glad it's fixed :) Aymu is healthy again.

Anyway, that was first and now for second I'm gonna show you some cool things I've seen along the way. I've got 2 for today.

One is this-



Just some mossy rocks at the beach right?
No- wrong!
When you look at it with a certain imagination you can see that it actually looks like a massive island, (think Jurassic Park) and it's the view you'd see if you were approaching it from above in a helicopter. Then, imagine that your about to parachute out of this helicopter and kill some aliens (like in predator), or something like that, and it just gets cooler and cooler to look at :)

The other is this-



A shop front in Cobargo. A gorgeous little town with a very adorable little cafe that we really should have had a coffee at, but didn't. #noregrets
Also had many many friendly locals :)
No wife, no horse, no moustache!
What!? :P
I don't know what it means, but I want to open up shop there and sell saddles and vintage clothes and foreign instruments.

We had the most beautiful drive down to Melbs, so many towns I'd love to magically find cheap land in and build a little clay house for my future babies...



But I kind of miss our Moruya family...



Alot.

And mainly this little crazy kitten-



Sienna Bella Corrine Malavey Ladmore.
She is such a wild child, but entertained me for hours on end, just by being gorgeous and bold and having no inhibitions at all. We've started talking like her and pulling some of her silly faces - she had such an influence on us :)

So- now, we are in Kingsville, celebrating our 1 year anniversary, currently watching Aladdin (wish the monkey didn't just grab the red jewel), and enjoying ourselves :)


All the love in the world!
We'll keep you updated, kind of :)

Way over the over-heating.

Our car got fixed!!!
New radiator and all!
So we finally left the blue mountains and took a BEAUTIFUL drive down south a little bit. (which is where we were headed all along)

I cannot get over how lovely the drive is, there is so much National Park, surrounding us, on every side. And then there is the odd average town… which is usually pretty average looking. They aren't the nicest things along the way, but they do help break up the journey.

Especially when you're stopping every half hour because the engine is over heating, EVEN after you've just paid LOTS of cash to get it fixed.
The plus side is that we got to move slowly and relaxedly, we got to drive at a low, comfortable speed, AND every time we stopped we got to read a little more of our books.

(I'm reading Ted Dekker's - The Circle Trilogy, which I have read before. It's written very averagely, but I'm in love with the story. I'm loving it all the same the second time around.)

We headed off the highway at Wollongong, drove straight on through.
Then stopped at Kiama and went for the nicest swim in the freshest ocean pool!! Then used the free showers, then cooked on their free BBQ's!! Then drove on to Gerroa for a majestic night stay on a glorious headland!



We drove ever so slowly to Moruya the next day, with a stop at PARADISE along the way. Jervis Bay. I am definitely going back to camp there at some point in the future. It's so amazing. Crystal clear blue water and white beaches and good snorkelling and nice rock climbing and cute little walking tracks. Nice.





Uhm, longer story short is that we EVENTUALLY arrived at Moruya, where H's relatives live. We are staying at the Malavey homestead, which is a glorious property full of glorious people.



Having some country time and some coastal time and some family time :)

On the road... or not :)

Hello!

So- we went for it. We bought the van (Aymu). We paid good money to make sure it was road worthy. We had a great time filling it with important things. We received countless blessings from friends and their families in the way of "free stuff" to borrow for our trip. We did a little graffiti on Aymu's face. We gave mom a hug. We filled the car with petrol. AND off we went!

Our first stop was Sydney :)
It took us hours to get there - car troubles.
I sat on the side of the freeway while H hitchhicked to get some coolant.
Then- all fixed.
We managed to get in on the tail end of filming for Jinja Safari's new film clip.
Then we went to our friends house in Newtown for the night.

The next day we went to the beautiful Blue Mountains!
I wasn't sure where to go, and the night before I had looked at the map and given up in defeat, because the amount of choices are overwhelming! We could go anywhere!
But the Blue Mountains have proven to be a good choice.



We parked the car at Echo Point for the night, after taking a small bush walk and buying groceries that included way to many sweets.



We cooked dinner and set up the van in the dark.

Today was a different kind of day.
Our car troubles began their journey away from us this morning when we dropped Aymu off at "Nigels Auto Technik" in Katoomba.
We packed lunch and snacks and rode off on our bikes.
And man! The Blue MOUNTAINS sure have a lot of hills!
Every where you go is either up-hill or down-hill.




But they were beautiful rides and it was a beautiful day.
Even if it did bring me to exhausted tears... Gosh my calves hurt.

We also went for a few little bush walks.



Then had a little nap in a park in Leura.
Like I said, I was exhausted.

We waited till Five and the Mechanics still hadn't called us so we rode back to Nigel's on MEGALONG Rd (it is MEGA long)
And it turned out the $700 job couldn't be finished today.
So we drove the van out the font of Nigels (hmm... this was done without it's radiator, which is on the floor of somebodies garage) and set up camp on the side of the road :)

This is a fun adventure.
It's intensive training for Going With The Flow.

Love you's!