Last Day Hervey Bay

It has been an eventful few days at Hervey Bay – not all of them memorable.  We never expected to travel without any drama’s but we had our first big hiccup on Saturday.

Awaiting our coffee at Toogoon

We were out having a look around the area and at around mid afternoon a strong southeasterly wind came up accompanied by driving rain. We did not give it too much thought as we had settled ourselves in the Hervey Bay RSL for an hour or so while it blew over. However on our arrival back to the motorhome, we found that the rain had driven up underneath the slideout cover (the slideout was out) and had leaked into the motorhome. While we have experienced similar weather in New Zealand, a leak was a new situation. Unfortunately for us the water leaked over the slideout, under the rubber seal and onto the table where the laptop computer was sitting. No explanation is really necessary suffice to say there was as much water in the laptop as there was on the table and on the ground outside.

Our first reaction was to try the cheap trick – put the laptop into a bag of kitty litter for 24 hours to try and dry it out – the trick did not work. The laptop was officially dead. On Monday we took it to a local Apple expert who was brilliant and managed to extract all our photographs and data from the sodden harddrive and transfer them to a ‘new’ laptop.  A costly exercise !!!!  We have introduced a new ‘risk management’ programme where we back up every two days now rather than weekly. We will also be a little more observant about weather from now on.

We have been very surprised at the number of Kiwi’s who are doing exactly the same as us over here. Last night we had 5 o’clockers with a couple from Auckland and another couple from Taupo. We are all heading in different directions this week but our paths will cross again sometime further north.

Part of the Burrum Heads population

This is our last day in Hervey Bay today so it was out this morning in the jeep to explore the outer areas. We visited small coastal areas such Toogoom and the Burrum Heads. A couple of things we noticed – quite a few new subdivisions in the area with every second house being brand new and for sale. You can buy a very large four bedroom home with pool, two or three bathrooms, Balanise style gardens, covered ‘summer’ area and your own private walk to the beach for A$500K.  A standard four beddy, two bathroom in a new subdivision is around A$300K. It is very evident that the financial crisis has had a real impact on this area of Australia.

We are off to dinner with friends at the Hervey Bay Boat Club this evening. It’s great that most of the Clubs (Surf, RSL’s and Bowling) have their own courtesy buses.  Its just a matter of giving them a call to let them know you are coming to dinner and about what time you want to be picked up. The drop home is usually on the hour every hour until midnight.

We are carrying on north tomorrow to Bundaberg and plan to stay there for about three days. We are awaiting a couple of courier packages which we hope will arrive over the next couple of days.