Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 61 - Saturday July 9th 2016 - Perth, Australia

So Joe was late!

To be fare we had cleared customs and baggage reclaim in record time!!

As we have UK passports you now don’t even need to speak to another human being you can just go up to the automated passport scanners and if they like you they let you in…no stamp, no questions but it took seconds.

Of course Joe did turn up, we waited about twenty minutes and then loaded the orange beast of a car up with all the bags and headed back to Clarkson to see the new house. It was great to see Joe, he is very much still the same as he ever was, as laid back as ever, not really looking any older and still as skinny as a rake.

Joe & Kates house is on a really new estate seemingly built on sand dunes. The house itself is huge (well for two people it is and they have everything

that you need right on their doorstep so it’s a good buy. The houses around them and their next door house are still being built as are a lot of the other houses and roads all around them so it all looks really new and shiny. What is great though is the sheer volume of landscaping that the developers have put in, really mature plants and there’s an abundance of them as well so it really adds instant character to the place.

This was the first time that we have ever travelled to Australia in the winter and it was cold, very cold compared to the temperatures we had been travelling elsewhere on our trips it was a bit of a shock to the system especially as Jonathan was still really suffering from the cold from hell, proper man nasal problems!

The plan kept changing of what to do with the day. Should we try and sleep for a few hours or should we just stay up and try and make it through? When we first arrived it seemed very doubtful that we would be able to stay awake but as we got talking, had a few cups of coffee, got up to date with all the news it looked less and less likely that we would turn in until the evening.

We actually ended up going out, back to Lakeside Shopping Centre in Joondalup where Joe and Kate used to live. We needed to buy some new clothes and fast as it was cold and we’ll be honest here and say that Joe and Kates house was also freezing! It’s a strange state of affairs when the garage is the warmest room in the house by far! We needed warm tops so within an hour we had bought cheap and cheerful to just see us through the next few weeks whilst we were here.

The weather was really throwing a spanner in the works with our plans. We had always intended to stay a week with Joe and Kate then fly to Melbourne for a weekend before hiring a camper van and driving back to Perth taking about three weeks in total. For those of you that have ever travelled in a camper van though you will know that they are not known for their insulation qualities so at this very moment the thought of being in this weather in a cold van was far from appealing. It was looking like the plan might change but we were in no position to start making plans just yet. We were still exhausted from lack of sleep and now we had the cold to contend with, hardly the right frame of mind to be in to decide these kind of things.

We had started the mountain of washing at the house, Joe and Kate had even been out and bought a new machine knowing that we would be arriving with loads of the stuff and their old one had been leaking a bit.

We managed to make it through the day, turning in at a quite remarkable 10pm at night after watching what was possible the worst vampire film I have ever seen on Netflix. Despite the cold in the house we knew that going to sleep was not going to be a problem at all and it wasn’t. Neither of us could even remember turning out the light!