Karma

I’m sitting watching the sunset on Toowoon Bay and listening to Scott work through a new song he has written. We’ve managed to exit our working life in Sydney and start our trip around OZ. Things started to get really hectic about 2 weeks ago when Scott managed to get all of his instruments (FINALLY) onto eBay. The good thing about this is that we got rid of the major bulk of our belongings but of course, this was quite painful for Scott. Despite being extremely non-materialistic (is that a word?), he is the first to admit that his instruments mean the world to him. The skin on our fingers were raw and peeling from so much packing tape. We are still carrying around a few items in the van waiting for people to pay us so that we can mail the damn things!

The night before we had to exit our apartment, we realized we were scheduled to exit on the Sunday (by 10 am) of a 4-day weekend that included Easter Monday. One thing we’ve learned about Australians is that they take their weekends and holidays very seriously. We couldn’t resist the urge to stay in our apartment one more day as we KNEW no one would be stopping by to make sure we had left. I did try to email the rental guy to ask if we could stay a couple more days but he never got back to me. True to form, no one stopped by and we managed to stay one more night in the apartment. We had everything moved out of the apartment except for our toothbrushes and a few food items. Karma was working hard against us though. Around 8pm on Sunday (the night we were not supposed to be in the apartment), both of us left the apartment together to get something from the van. We came back to the apartment only to realize we had locked ourselves out. This is serious bidness since we couldn’t really call the rental agency to ask them if they had an extra key, without a really good story about why we were still in the apartment. After a few expletives and many natural bursts of adrenaline, I suggested that maybe we ask our neighbors if I could try and climb around the brick wall between our balconies. Scott was very skeptical and our bewildered neighbor (who didn’t speak much English) managed to mutter the word “d a n g e r o u s”. I was determined. It turned out that it was quite easy to scale the wall because my foot had a nice 6-inch ledge. Did I mention the apartment was on the 8th floor?

We were lucky enough to have our building manager (thank you Wayne) hook us up with some free storage in our old apartment building. Unlucky for us, it was in the garbage compactor room and the smell will surely permeate EVERYTHING we store. We tried to put plastic bags over everything we expected to eventually want in our van but I somehow doubt this will keep the smell out.

We’ve been living in the van for a week and we’ve only managed to get about 120 miles north of Sydney. At this rate, we’ll get around the perimeter of OZ sometime in 2012. Although the weather is starting to get a bit chilly (high of 70 degrees), we are still having so much fun exploring the areas close to the place we called home for a year. We have spent lots of time actively adventuring as well as some well-needed time in the basements of our brain (gotta credit that phrase to The National). Bedtime = 9pm and wakeup = 6:30am. Perfect.