The Israels Australian Adventure

We didn't make bridge last night as we were still so tired come 8:00 pm so we decided to go this morning instead.   Brisbane has their own Bridge Centre which was lovely.  16.5 tables so they split the room into 2 sections.  We did well, 68.1% and surprisingly they are happy for us to come back!  They were all really friendly and welcoming.  The really weird thing was bidding.  No bidding boxes, instead you have a pad in the centre of the table and you each write down your bid.  If the bid your partner makes needs alerting you lean across the table and circle your partner's bid.  When bidding stops you move the board on top so that you can't still see the bidding.  Poor trees !!  We were N/S. After bridge we drove to IKEA.  Another experience.  Up the escalators we went only to find a huge furniture shopping centre.  IKEA was through the other side and across the road eventhough the car park linked the two.  I ha...

Georgia kindly lent us her car whilst she is still over with us in England and so yesterday we spent the day going from car showroom to car showroom.  After 4 hours they all started to blurr together but we did have a firm favourite.  For a change David wouldn't be tempted to increase the budget!!   As usual we ended up back at the first garage.  After the test drive of a Toyota Rav4 and a Kluger it was the latter that came out the winner.  Our first criteria was comfort and it won hands down.   After we paid the deposit we realised the remaining balance was $2,000 less than the ticket price.  David checked what the outstanding balance was and when confirmed we both smiled and didn't question the price drop but both thought - result!! Car home.  We ended up with the garage throwing in another 6 month's registration so the car came in at $2,500 under budget.  David is delighted😀 We do now need to park old school with no sensors or c...

Now at Nat and Rob's. New emergency contacts are: Karen +61408921719 David +61459850211

What a day. We paniced when we realised we had looked and catered for first/business class hand luggage and sadly not poor economy class. We were only over 3Kg each so don't laugh Dale we bought 5kg of extra luggage allowance.  Thereby giving us 65Kg for the trip plus our 14kg for hand luggage.  Amazing how much STUFF weighs!!!   Anyway, Michael drove us to the airport with no real delays.  So we are off to bed.  Who can spot the planes coming into land?  

Small amount of currancy bought today. Also set up a Revolut account for each of us to try and avoid the 3% surcharge on spending in other currencies. Karen has succumbed to mobile banking apps. She is raving about them and wished she had followed her mother, years ago. Also been looking at 2step verification needed to login to Google accounts etc. Wanted to avoid text to our UK numbers as our roaming charge will be £6 a day. Will post our Australian mobile numbers once we have the sims in our phones.

22nd August, 2023 We have still not finalised everything as far as timings are concerned.  We plan to start on Wed, 1st November and want to be in Adelaide for Nat & Maddie (hopefully Rob too) joining us at the start of the school holidays on 6th December.  So here is what we think at the moment.  We have a huge list of things to see and do in each area. Map 1 - The Gold Coast Because the Gold Coast is so close to Brisbane we decided not to spend too much time here as we have the whole of February to revisit areas we want to see in more depth.  We have allowed 6 days to get to Gosford which is approximately 1,000 Km. Map 2 - Sydney On our last trip we were lucky enough to spend a whole week just down by the bridge but we couldn't go to see the Blue Mountains because of terrible fires they were experiencing at the time.  So this time we are rectifying that.  5 days covering approx 500 Km.  This time we are planning on taking the tra...

Saturday, 6th May 2023 Our initial thoughts were to fly to Perth, buy a car and then drive to Nat & Rob's in Queensland.  However after doing extensive research we realised that we didn't really want to drive through central Australia.  It would take a long time, be very boring and potentially dangerous.  Not to mention the logistics of buying a vehicle in one state and registering it in another.  So we decided to fly to see Perth, Darwin, Alice Springs and the all essential Uluru.  David has always wanted to visit Uluru so for this trip it was a must.  The best time to visit Uluru is July-September.   Nat & Rob's daughter Georgia is visiting us in England in August/Sept so the earliest we could go was September. We therefore decided to fly straight to Brisbane so that we could drop off our large cases and give ourselves the working week to recover from the flight and buy a car (see following posts for these plans).   Sat, 16th S...