He's back and recovering

Monday week ago, Mark had his back operation. It turned out that the prolapse was much worse than first anticipated and he ended up being in surgery for nearly 2 hours. But the surgeon (Greg Malham) was very pleased with how it all went and was happy with how the remainder of the disc looked.

Mark remained in hospital until Thursday when he came home in an ambulance - because he can't sit at all - he either has to lie, or stand and not for very long. Casting no aspersions on the ambo driver, he said it was like being in a washing machine!!

Mark with the 2 ambulance medics who bought him home

The kids were rapt to see him and immediately got into bed with him. Much supervision is needed when they are with daddy though, although one on one, they are ok. But together, they think that the bed is an amusement playground and jump all over the place.


Recovery is going well except for a slight hiccup Monday morning. Sunday night, Mark complained of being a bit itchy on his back. To me, it looked like a bit of a rash where he'd been lying for a while, and I thought he may have needed a pressure mat or something. But come Monday morning, he was covered from head to toe in a raised itchy red rash. I have never seen any thing like it (just remembering it is making me itchy right now!!) So off to the hospital (slow trip in the car!) to get it checked out, plus taking the little girl with us because she also had a rash on her legs and body.

Turns out it is urticaria (or hives) which has resulted from a reaction to the digesic (painkillers) he was on. Hence, no more painkillers - although he was nearly finished them anyway. So now he is on big doses of antihistamines and cortisone to treat the itchy rash. Today, it is slowly going, which is good. But the itch remains. Biddy, on the other hand, simply has bug bites (mozzies) and she has made them worse by scratching at them. But we have also discovered that she is highly sensitive to the sticky on bandaids (which I used to cover up the bites) and now she has broken out in rashes from them! Sigh.

So the back is good - so far - and he is bored, so all is well on the homefront. I, on the other hand, am run ragged from running after the kids and Mark. LOL!

Sun, silage and shows

Hold on tight everyone, because this is a CRAZY time of year.

Yes, silage season has hit us and a little bit early this year too. We are into it now, with most of the home farm cut and raked and waiting for the contractors to arrive tomorrow morning. The paddocks over the road will be started tomorrow and the contractors will be in them and most likely finished by Friday. I remember when I first arrived at Craiglands about 9 year ago, that silage used to take nearly 2 weeks. Now, if we get good weather, it is all over and done with in about 3 - 4 days and that includes covering the stacks. Improved machinery, different technologies and management have attributed to this. But it is a crazy 4 days still!

And it is just as well that it will be all pretty well finished by the weekend, because Mark has a date for his back operation. He is booked in for Monday 9th November at Epworth in Melbourne. he'll be in hossie for about 3 - 4 days and then will be discharged home in an ambulance (because he cannot sit up) where he'll be useless...ahem, I mean recuperating, for a month. During this time, he is not allowed to sit in a car, do too much walking, absolutely no work, no lifting....nothing. It will be heaven for him, hell for me. After the first month,. he'll be able to start to resume some light activity, and then after another month get into moderate activity and then he should be ok about 12 weeks after the op. So, if anyone is in Melbourne on the 10th - 13th November, give him a call and drop in and see him. I'm sure he'll be grateful for the visitors.

But before he goes under the knife, we are showing cows at Colac show. We are training 3 cows at the moment; 1 from last year who has slotted back into it all quite nicely, and 2 newies. Although I must say that the 2yo we are training has already been halter broken as a calf (never made it to the show though), so she is a piece of cake. She did however stand on my foot yesterday when I was leading her around and I think she may have done a bit of damage as my little toe is PURPLE. Nice one. The other cow we have is a right tart. Is taking a stronger person than me to break her (thanks Huthy!). Hopefully she'll shape up in a couple of days.

So I am in the midst of leading cows, washing cows and specialty feeding cows as well as everything else. And I just remembered that the BAS is due at the end of the week. Good grief.

All over bar the shouting

Well, we are back home now (boo hoo) and pretty much straight back into it. But let me recap the final leg of our journey.....

Day 12
We left Albury headed for Melbourne to visit relatives (the Butlers). We had a final breaky of bacon and eggs, much to Mark's disgust as he wanted to get out a bit earlier, but both the kids and I were up for it! We eventually left just after 10am.

Heading down the Hume Hwy (one of the most boring roads I have driven on.....maybe because I have driven it MANY times), I was lamenting about all the towns that are now bypassed. Yes, I agree that when you want to get from point A to point B in a hurry, major arterials like the Hume are great. But the towns along the Hume that have been bypassed have not always done well and some are a mere shadow of what they were. I don't want to really mention any in particular, because as soon as I do, someone from that town will be on me like a shot saying how the town is fine, but I reckon you can all understand what I mean. As a result of these bypasses, great monoliths have sprung up, usually adorned with a giant golden "M" or similar. Sigh.....

We took some of the backroads and called in to some of the towns - Euroa for example, where we had lunch. Mark said we were travelling route 66 (for those that have seen "Cars" you'll know what I mean!).

We headed to Melbourne via Alexandra, Marysville and surrounds to see how things were recovering after the devastating fires earlier in the year. OMG. I hadn't been up this way for a few years (I think the last time was when played waterpolo for the last time at Alex back in about 2001) and I was gobsmaked. It was really hard to get your bearings, particularly in Marysville where hardly any of the buildings survived and all the trees are gone. As mentioned in earlier posts from this year, Mark fought fires up at the Alexandra fire and he was interested to see how it can recovered. I am no tree expert, but from what I could see from the ute, many of the trees on the Cathedral Range looked dead.

Leaving this sad, but recovering area, we headed to Beaconsfield. For the first time for the whole trip (my opinion only), the GPS did it's job. I really didn't think about how to get there from NE Vic, but it directed us to drop from Marysville through the Black Spur, down to Emerald and then to Beaconsfield. Easy!

We spent the next couple of nights with family, not doing very much but catching up. Mark hadn't been down to see the Butlers since early December last year and I hadn't been there since April, so it was nice to catch up. We just parked the van out the front and hooked up to their power!

On Sunday, we packed up and headed home. Everyone was a bit quiet and like the end of all trips, it was a bit sad to drive in the front gate.

Here it is Wednesday and the van is still not 100% unpacked. Life on the farm started the moment we drove in the gate - Mark was out to look at a cow, I was sorting bills getting ready to pay... Mark's eyes have started to play up again, and in the last couple of days have gunked up again and are blood red. Even the cows are looking at him funny. If he's not careful, he'll get pulled out for a vet treatment the next time Mike comes to look at one of the cows!!

So that's it. Our first family holiday with Biddy and the caravan. I'm happy to say that everything went better than I expected (with the kids and the van). Thanks to those that have followed my ramblings. We are now looking forward to planning our next trip which is to Darwin to catch up with the Stevenson's in mid March 2010. In the meantime, we have harvest, Colac show, Mark's back operation, Biddy's birthday, Christmas and the usually madness that accompanies our general lives!

The home run

Day 10: Wellington to Young

We started off the day by visiting one of the caves at Wellington. We decided on the Phosphate Mine and the Bone Cave as this was probably going to interest Tom the most. At various points of the tour, you got to see bones that were embedded in the clay/rock which were dated between 800,000 and 1 million years old! Pretty amazing. And at the end of the tour, you got to hold some of the fossils. The skeletons of the Diprotadon (actually not a dinosaur, but a ‘megafauna’) and the Thylacoleo (also not a dinosaur but another megafauna) were in fact not real but casts. But still, the way they were portrayed as being slightly dug out of the ground was very effective and Tom thought it was just great!

As a bit of interest, the Diprotadon was like a really big wombat with large teeth and grew to heights of about 1.2m and length of around 3m. It weighed about 2.5 – 3 tonnes. Depending on the source, they became extinct only about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. Thylacoleo was sort of like a marsupial lion and ate other early marsupial, including Diprotadon. They grew probably about as big as a female lioness.

OK lecture over.

The rest of the day was pretty much spent travelling to Young, although we did have a small visit to Cowra to see the site of the POW camp. By coincidence, an older lady that was at the site at the same time as us told me how her father used to own the property where the POW camp was and it was only recently sold out of the family to the government to be listed as a heritage site.

We amused ourselves today on our drive by counting the number of dead kangaroos on the side of the road. 15 ended up being the final tally.

We stayed the night at the Young Tourist Park. A number of pros and cons for this park (see below), but as we pulled in late and left around 10am, we didn’t really take advantage of too much except the showers and the laundry. We are trying to run our food stores down, so everyone almost ate something different tonight. The food issue was one of the main reasons for purchasing something like a caravan, camper or camper trailer. You are able to eat what you like, when you like and cater to individual’s tastes. This is always my major battle when staying elsewhere and relying on purchasing food for the kids. Let’s face it, there is only so many times that you can (or want to) live on McNuggets, pizza and the like. Sometimes you just hanker for a good ol’ snag! Anyway, this aspect has now been largely resolved for me as we are now able to carry our own food with us. In buying the van, I opted for less bench space in order to accommodate a larger fridge. And now that we have been away for a few weeks, I am so glad I did.

Caravan park wrap up: at the time of our visit, the Young Tourist Park seemed such an ironic name as the vast majority of people staying there were of the grey nomad brigade. Perhaps it should have been called the “Old Tourist Park”! Seriously, this park has also seen better days, and whilst it is clean, is very worn around the edges. The site we had was right next to the amenities which was fine, and it was well grassed. The distance between the vans was also reasonable and the way that most people had parked, meant you weren’t looking into anyone else’s van. We didn’t use the BBQs at all (used our own cooker), but Mark tells me that the water to wash up with was nice and hot (yes, don’t fall over...Mark has been doing the dishes the entire time we have been away. Hope it keeps up!). The big downfall of this park was the kiddy friendliness. The playground was, in one word, CRAP. There were only three pieces of equipment (2 springy seesaw thingys and a strange looking monkey bar), and one of the seesaws was broken and the monkey bars would be too high for a 8yo let alone for a 4yo and 21mth old. Unlike some of the other parks we had been in, there was no ability to bath or change the kids, unless they were in with you, which is rather a PITA quite frankly. But the owner was friendly and explained everything to us, and the park suited our needs of an overnighter well. If you have kids, I would advise to miss this park unless you are only stopping for the night. It may suit older generations though, depending on how friendly you want to be.


Day 11: Young to Albury

A fairly uneventful trip to Albury today. We stopped in at Gundagai to take the obligatory photo with the dog on the tuckerbox (although, Tom was convinced it was a wolf!). When we arrived in Albury we booked into the Albury All Seasons Tourist Park. The playground here is very well appointed with the kids playing on the equipment for about half an hour whilst Mark set up the van. Biddy overestimates her abilities in many things and going down big slides is no exception. She has no fear of heights and today took a tumble off a 6” slide. She spotted it first and got to it before Tom, so she had not seen anyone else go down it. Instead of sitting down at the top, she goes down the first part standing up and then face plants on the slide and bounces off into the chipbark at the bottom. I was ready for the scream and cry, but no, she got up, dusted herself off and got right back on it again. Tough kid.

We took the kids bowling as Tom enjoyed this so much when I took him at Christmastime. We just let Biddy have some of our goes, and embarrassingly, she did just as well (or better) than Mark and I! Mark won the first game, I won the second. Tom held his own very well, scoring in the 70’s both times.

Tonight we took the kids to the Commercial Club for dinner and we told Tom that it was a restaurant. So he was on his best behaviour and he really did try. Although he did pour salt all over his meal just after being told to leave the shaker alone. The clubs are a great place to take kids as usually under 5’s are free and all it cost us for them tonight was a glass of lemonade each. Plus, there is a huge choice of food (and desserts) for them and you can almost be guaranteed that they will eat something.

Tomorrow we are really heading south and will wind up at the Butler’s place (relatives) in Beaconsfield for a couple of nights before going home on Sunday.

Caravan park wrap up: this park is very nice. As mentioned before, the playground is very well appointed and set out. The pool is nice but was too cold for us to use this trip. The showers are smallish, but the water is hot and the pressure is good and this is the first park that we have visited that has a sunken area for the shower and a raised bit to get dried on. Saves getting your pants wet in the puddles of the shower, or having to put them on in the main toilet area for everyone to see! The ladies bathroom also had a baby bath (large trough) with plenty of room to lie baby down to dry and change. And as a nice touch, there were cloths hanging up for you to dry out the stainless steel sink when finished, and also a hairdryer supplied in the bathroom. The laundry was fine (2 washers, 1 dryer) and both a reasonable cost ($3 and $2 respectively). We haven’t used the camp kitchen yet, but will give it a workout tomorrow when we have bacon and eggs for breaky. The downsides are that the vans are a bit close especially in the drivethroughs and because of the configuration, you tend to end up looking into your neighbours van. The road noise is very noticeable, but this is on the Hume Hwy (Wagga Rd), so it is to be expected I guess. This park is also a little way out of the Albury CDB but there are plenty of eateries, shops, supermarkets etc on the main road not far from the park. The only other gripe is that there is a lot of gravel around, which makes for noisy walking and driving. But all in all, a very nice park and is good enough to spend any number of nights here to base yourself out of to visit the surrounds of Albury Wodonga.

Heading south

Our night at the Warrumbungle National Park was very good. In the middle of the night, I had to make an obligatory pit stop and was overawed by the night sky. It was truly beautiful. The moon had set and without a cloud in the sky, it was like you could see beyond our galaxy with the naked eye. It has been many years since I have been somewhere that you can see the night sky in so much detail. It's at these times that I regret not knowing more about astronomy so I could better appreciate it all. I also now know why there are so many observatories in these parts!

Tom was absolutely taken with the compost toilets ("Daddy, there is NO flusher! The poo just goes on the ground!") and made numerous trips to them. Biddy was delighted in just being able to wander around at leisure and not being constantly called to come back.

A late start today due to a computer malfunction at home (just prior to morning milking) that saw Mark trying to deal with 3 people all at the same time to try and fix a computer that he could not log on remotely to. All's well though thanks to the great staff at Westfalia. I also had the makings of a migraine (didn't eventuate though..phew). We eventually left our little campsite at around 11am headed for Wellington. We decided to take a route which took us through an area where a number of years ago (1994) I worked for ABARE conducting farm surveys (part of a secondment with Dept of Ag). This route took us through Binnaway, Coolah and Gulgong. I have no idea what Binnaway's claim to fame is, but Coolah is home of the black stump (took a picture of it with the kids), and Gulgong holds the title of the 'Ten Dollar Town" as it was the town that featured on our old paper $10 notes. We grabbed a bite to eat in Coolah and whilst walking to the cafe, we passed a small general store that had the most darling nativity scene for sale. I snapped it up.

We arrived at the Wellington Caves Caravan Park in Wellington too late to do any cave tours (what Wellington is famous for), so this is on our agenda tomorrow. And guess what? They also have dinosaurs here! Typical! So we will take in a tour that shows some dinosaur fossils as well (the dino from these parts was sort of like a giant wombat with sharp teeth. I'll get the details for the next post).

Despite being in the car for most of the day, the kids went to bed pretty early, which is just as good, because the cave tour we are embarking on is 1.5hrs.

Oh, and a quick update on Mark's eyes...they are much better this evening after looking pretty bad for most of the day. I can even see some white in the whites of his eyes! The drops and ointment seem to be finally doing something for him, although I still keep my distance in case he gives it to me!

Caravan park wrap up: this caravan park is attached to the cave tours, so accessibility is 100%. It is an old park and has seen a lot of visitors, but it caters well for a range of campers (caravans, tents, big rigs) and even has motel style accommodation. Whilst we didn't use it, the camp kitchen has a great range of facilities which would be great for those in tents. The playground is modest, but our kids thought it was good, with Biddy having no trouble using equipment. The amenities are old but clean and the water (and pressure) is good and hot and the washing machines clean with the cost to use them reasonable. There is a baby's bathroom which is a small sink and a toilet, but it's downfall is that there is nowhere to lay the baby down to dry and clothe them. A change table would improve this immensely. At this time of year, you can have your pick of any site (we chose the one right near the playground so we didn't have to move too far to watch kids). This park is ideal for those that need a couple of nights to base themselves in order to explore the caves and maybe the nearby Lake Burrendong, although there is campsites on the lake for those that are more self sufficient.

The eyes have it!

Bit of a play on words there, but we can't not mention how truly, unbelievably, scarily disgusting Mark's eyes now are. In fact, they are so bad that he had to see a doctor in Coonabarabran to get some heavy duty eye drops and ointment. He tells me that not only do they look bad (and believe me, they DO look bad), but they are also painful - sort of like flash burns from a welder. With all of the pus constantly coming out of them, coupled with the entire whites of his eyes now blood red, even the chemist had a hard time looking at him. Ugh. Hopefully the medications will do the trick, but we have been told that what he has is extremely contagious and that we shouldn't share any linen and to disinfect the washing (yeah right....on a caravan trip!). Mark says that he now has a new empathy with cows that get pink eye.

Today we left Dubbo and headed for the Warrumbungle National Park. In particular, Camp Blackman campsite. On the way, I decided to count the number of caravans, motorhomes and the like. By the time we got to Coonabarabran, I was up to 52. A fair number considering that the trip wasn't all that long (180kms). A quick stop in town (to see aforementioned dr) and grab some lunch before heading out to the National Park (about 36km further along).

The winding road into the park was dotted with a number of places that had their own little observatories. This is probably due to the fact that the Sliding Springs Observatory is located in the Warrumbungles. It is open during the day for visitors, but closed in the evenings because the scientists are conducting their experiments. We might call in there on our way out tomorrow.

Being a National Park, we had to collect firewood outside the park boundaries, so after depositing Biddy and I at the camp ground, Mark took Tom off for wood collection. They came back with a modest pile - enough to cook the obligatory marshmallows that we had promised Tom. He has never been camping before, and was so excited. Unbelievably, he was great around the fire, and neither kid scorched themselves on gooey confectionery.

The kangaroos are absolutely everywhere in here, many of them with joeys in their pouches suggesting that either there were some fertile roos around, or it was a good year nutritionally. Probably both! At any rate, there are Eastern Greys all over the place. And they obviously see lots of campers, because they are far from wary of us.

There are plenty of walks around here and I'm sorry that we are not here long enough to give a few a go. The scenery is spectacular - the Warrumbungles were formed as a result of volcanic activity 13 - 17 million years ago and have quite distinct craggy peaks. But be warned; in seasons other than summer, I can imagine that it gets damn cold in here. Even tonight, the cold air simply appeared and forced us into the confines of the van a bit earlier than anticipated. Bring warm stuff.

Campsite wrap up: the campsites here (that caravans can use at the least), are quite civilised, with some of the powered sites sporting bitumened areas. There is quite a bit of room here, but I am lead to believe that it is quite crowded in NSW school holidays. Even now, there are a few in. There is a new powered site area just opened up, but there is very little shade here (not a problem at the moment) as the trees are so small. The older area is amongst established trees and I daresay, would be more popular in summer. There is an amenities block (showers and toilets, public phone) which we haven't visited yet (it is a bit of a walk), but there are compost toilets close by to all the camp areas. You are allowed to have fires, but being a National Park you have to bring in your own wood. This is a nice place to rough it a bit whilst having some of the small luxuries around you. Great if you are into bushwalking or just lolling about, but unless small kids are into bushwalking too, you may find that they will be pestering you to 'do something' as there is no playground (that I saw anyway). I believe that there is a discovery programme for kids, but I don't know the details. I liked this place and would definitely return if around this way.

Half over

Sigh... a whole week has passed in the blink of an eye. And it has been pretty good as well with the kids taking to the whole adventure with great gusto. Today we spent a bit of a cruisy day bumming around for most of the morning before visiting the Old Dubbo Gaol. An interesting place to spend a couple of hours, peering into the past at how criminals used to be treated. There were 8 executions at the Dubbo Gaol, all of them because the inmate was guilty of murder. Some of the crimes were truly horrendous, even by today's standards.

The building that houses all the cells has a couple of solitary confinment cells and they are something to behold. They are in pitch black darkness and Tom was extremely reluctant to go inside even with both Mark and myself beside him. Even the lux feature (night vision) on our video camera did nothing in the total blackness. And prisoners spent sometimes weeks in there.

The rest of the day was spent just lazing around the caravan park with Tom spending much of it on the jumping pillow. It has been bloody chilly here the past couple of days which is a bit of a shame as there is a pool here that Tom has been bugging me to get in, but there is no way I'm getting in when the outside temp is barely cracking 15 degrees.

Tomorrow we are headed for Warrumbungle National Park, and the northernmost point of this trip.

Caravan park wrap up: so we spent 3 nights at the Parklands Big 4 Caravan Park and there are some pros and cons. For those that are looking for a quiet intimate park, then this is not for you. This is a large park with a number of sites. When we first arrived, the park was close to being full, but the past 2 nights have seen it empty out a bit. Our site - C13 - was quite spacious and allowed us to park the caravan, park the ute beside it and pull out the annex as well. Not something that can be done at all the sites. After both Mark and I struggled to shower the kids the first night, we discovered that this park has both a baby and a toddler bathroom. I can't comment on the baby one, but the toddler one has a bath and shower and has plenty of room. A definate plus in my book. I have previously mentioned the jumping pillow which both kids thought was simply fabbo. And it is. But the playground associated with it could do with a little more equipment suitable for babies and little toddlers. The jumping pillow gets a bit crowded (and rough) with the older kids using it, so the younger ones can find it a bit of a struggle. Something else for them would be good. The amenities are good - the camp kitchen is clean and has plenty of room and seating, the water is hot and there are a decent number of showers and toilets. However, the cleaning roster of the toilet blocks could be reviewed with the women's closed between 9 & 10am and the men's closed between 10 & 11am. Right when people are making their last abulutions before leaving. Whilst we never used it, there is also a small kiosk in the reception area where you can buy some groceries. All in all, I give this park a tick. It is certainly a very good place to base yourself from when visiting Dubbo and surrounds and is conveniently located almost next to the Open Range Zoo.