Apart from a few weekends spent at Shoal Haven Heads, south of Wollongong, whilst living in Penrith, and after our move to Hervey Bay, a few weeks here and there spent at Woodgate, Elliott Heads, Baffle Creek, Gympie, Boonooroo and Mundubbera, our next major trip was 12th February 2003, when we hit the road with our caravan in tow to head south.
This trip was to take us three months, and we’d engaged house sitters for that time…never again would we do this, but that’s another story for another time perhaps.
We’d planned on traveling slowly down the Pacific Highway to Sydney before heading inland to Canberra, down the Great Ocean Road, to Mt. Gambier, ending up in Adelaide. Our return trip was planned to take us slowly along the Murray, then onto Canberra, Sydney and inland to home via Warwick, Toowoomba and Crows Nest.
Our first stop was Alexander Headland on the Sunshine Coast for a few days, then on to The Gold Coast for a few more days, catching up with family at the same time.
Our next stop was Kempsey overnight, then on to Forster for a week. What a week that was too… it rained for the entire week. Fortunately the caravan park had Austar cabled to each site, so we watched movies most of the time. Then it was on to Sydney to again catch up with family and friends.
Sydney was not kind to us. The night before we were to leave for Canberra, Bev suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night and ended up in the cardiac ward at Nepean Hospital in Penrith. Ironically she was in the same bed that I’d occupied some eighteen months before.
An angiogram revealed that she had a blocked artery and required an angioplasty and stent. She was transferred to Westmead Hospital for this, and spent a total of ten days in hospitals.
Leaving Sydney behind us, we headed for Canberra to again catch up with family. Whilst in Canberra Bev again suffered some heart related problems and spent four days in Calvary Hospital.
By this time I was thinking that we were going to do a tour of every major hospital we came to along our planned route. I was searching for the title of the book we would write about the inside of every hospital between Sydney and Adelaide.
Her doctors were not keen on us continuing our planned trip, so instead we stopped in Canberra for a month, where Bev could recuperate and be spoiled by her baby sister and family, before slowly heading north again.
This time we bypassed Sydney and stopped off at Anna Bay, Port Stephens for five days before heading to Port Macquarie for seventeen days, and Yamba for another five days.
By this time the dreaded rain had found us again, and after leaving Yamba we were going to spend a few days on the coast south of Tweed Heads. We arrived in Tweed Heads dragging the rain along with us. A quick phone call confirmed that it wasn’t raining in Crows Nest, so that’s where we headed for a pleasant few days before arriving back in Hervey Bay on 12th May.
We both vowed and declared that one day we’d complete the trip we’d started, and had to abandon.
