ANOTHER YEAR ….. AND ‘THE BLOG’ IS BACK.

Monday 12 August 2013 – Castella to Junee.

Well we are off on our latest escapade, and contrary to expectations (and our previous experience), today has gone without a hitch.  Well, apart from a small problem last night when we were staying at Amanda and Mark’s in Castella, where my Dongle and my laptop became a bit contrary and decided not to work together.  Though the dongle had me connected to the internet, it wouldn’t let me send emails as it said it was offline, and there was no way I could connect it.  I handballed the problem to Mark, who knows a lot more about these things than I do, but he had no success either.  I made two lengthy phone calls to the provider who eventually told me I needed to ring Google today and they would sort it out.

I didn’t really see how that could help matters, so instead called into a Telstra shop at Benalla this morning, where a young computer geek spent about twenty minutes or so fiddling with it, then told me it was fixed!  Apparently a box in Internet Explorer had been ticked which told the computer to keep the email section off line.  He kindly unticked it, and here we are!!

We left Castella at around nine this morning, cloudy and very windy, and obviously recent rain, but by then it seemed to have passed.  The countryside up through Yea and Seymour is lovely and green and we enjoyed the drive – even had a fox dash across the road in front of us near Yea.  We might see more wildlife than we did last year!  After our stop at Benalla, our next break was for lunch in Albury. 

As we left there I now felt like we were actually on holidays – we’d filled the petrol tank for the first time on the trip, we’d had our first meal (even if it was only at Macca’s) and we were already interstate! And best of all, the sun was shining.  It turned out a very nice afternoon, though the wind was strong and chilly once we got out of the car. 

Tonight we are camped at Junee – about 40 km’s north of Wagga at a very nice camp beside a lake, nice and quiet – at least it was until about an hour ago when I heard a continuous noise apparently coming from somewhere in the caravan park.  I though it must have been a generator, however after about twenty minutes it suddenly got very loud so Grant was dispatched to investigate.  It was the train …… going right past the front of the park, and it was deafening!

Junee is a pretty spot, very hilly, with a liquorice and chocolate factory (closed when we arrived), a correctional centre (fancy name for a prison), which we went out to look at and saw a couple of the inmates exercising behind the double security fencing, and some really nice old buildings.

So that’s today – not a lot to report, and Grant managed all his caravan setting-up jobs without even a twinge in his shoulder, so that is the best part.