Travels and Times of the Growing McNaught Family: Things are starting to look up.

Well things are going well. Last Thursday we picked up our family car for me. We took it to Brisbane on Friday to get it registered. Let me tell you, the registration for a car here is nice and easy, but very expensive! We paid about $800! and the car was only $5000. So I got a Mitsubishi Magda Solara '98. Has air, power steering, cruise, and Auto transmission, which though basic in America is not common here.

Friday was a great adventure. I drove all around the city in my new car on the wrong side. It was great fun. There are a few things that annoy me about driving here. One, the street signs. They always tell you what road you can turn onto but not what road you are actually on. Very hard to figure out where you are when you don't know what road you are on. Two, the freeway exits and entrances. You can't assume that if you can get off at one, that there is an on ramp as well. Sometimes you get off at one place and have to drive down the service road to get back on. And sometimes you have to drive down, find a way to cross over to the other side, and then get back on. It's a mess. Three, they don't always have solid lines down the middle of the roads. A few roads I drove on had three lanes separated by white dashed lines. To us that means that all traffic is going the same way. And there was a car going the other direction so many times I was thinking I was driving the wrong way down a one way street only to find I was actually driving correctly. The left and right lanes were for driving and the middle was a turning lane. But how come the lines didn't tell you that?

I only got really lost once. I usually knew where I was and where I wanted to get to, just not how to get there because of the roads. Oh, none of the roads go straight either. You could turn north, knowing you had to go that way to get somewhere, only to end up going south by the end of the road. After I got myself unlost that one time, I was so excited cause I had to pee, and I was almost out of gas that I went a little fast and got a speeding ticket. Nice huh, welcome to Australia, here's a speeding fine. And boy they are expensive and strict. $250! The same ticket in America would have been about $60. Which brings us to the speed limit signs. For some reason I can't see them unless I look for them specifically, which I do now. They are just regular numbers on a white round sign with a small red circle around them. The average freeway, or motorway as they call them here, speed is 110 km.

I only went to the wrong side of the road once all day. And you know what....I see Aussie's pull U turns in the middle of the road, turn right from left lanes, cut people off, and do many crazy things, but when I drive on the wrong side once everyone gets mad at me! hmmm. It wasn't a busy street so it wasn't that bad, though when the car came, I unthinkingly reacted and pulled over to the right side to let them through. So what do they do, the pull really close to me, and gesture through the windows like I can move for them now that they have blocked me in. Oh well. Driving in the city is not my cup of tea on a normal day on the right side, so Friday was really fun! NOT!

Sat we got a lot done. We had a house and a dog before 10am. Good work! I will post more about both of these tomorrow after I go and get some pictures. Plus this post is getting awfully long already. We are packed up from Kaye and David's house and have a bunch of free stuff that they had stored in the shed and with a few borrowed things, we should be able to live quite nicely until our stuff on the boat gets here. What I still can't believe is the prices here. A toaster here is $50 as well as an iron, and that's if you go with the cheap one. We do have a site sort of like FreeCycle and Craig's list that we will check out to try to get most of our stuff. We have enough free stuff to last till we find exactly what we want.

We will be going up there today to move most of the stuff in, but returning to Kaye and David's tonight. I have to work in the morning but after that we will be mostly staying up at our new house. Which means I won't have internet for about a week. I'll do one more post tomorrow before I go and then update everyone again on Sat when we come back to the farm for visiting. And I think that's about it for today. More coming tomorrow....