On the road with Nala

November 21st, 2018

Pumba - Feb'15

I had gone down to Melbourne for 24h to have a look at a car I'd found online. A green Subaru Forester, to be precise. The exact same car I had bought in Melbourne almost 4 years ago. 

I knew those kind of cars and had come to love them very much during my 5month road trip in 2015. So I headed out to a south eastern suburb of Melbs to go have a look at this Forster I found online. 

Long story short, I wasn't convinced of the Subaru and fell in love with a Toyota RAV4 in stead. 

And so Nala had come into my life.

That day I drove back home to Kyabram, an almost 4hour drive which should've only taken me 2 hours. But anyway. 

I BOUGHT A CAR !!

I had to stretch my budget to the limit but as I was working at the vet clinic, the problem got solved pretty quick. so all was goooood.

my dear Nala, back home Nov'18

Meanwhile I was still looking for a horse job, which lead to my very first road trip the next weekend. Hence I bought a cheap mattress and headed north east for the weekend. Unfortunately the job didn't work out, on the bright side I had a great inaugural road trip ! 

The job opportunity I was driving to would be on a showjumping and (apparently) racehorse yard. As a horse trainer who has quite some specific experience in showjumping I jumped at this opportunity to possibly be able to train show-jumpers again like I once did back home. 

carlife

So Friday morning I headed off toward Sydney area, the start of a 700+ km one way journey.

Rocky hill memorial

Day one I drove up until Goulburn, almost 600k's from home where I decided to stay the night. Goulburn, as it turns out, is actually a lovely city in the Southern Tablelands of NSW. I arrived around 5pm and after discovering that the tourist information centre closed at 5 I started to look around for a place to stay the night (without paying waaaay to much money). So I stoped at the K-mart, bought myself some sheets and headed up to the rocky hill memorial for sunset. And what a glorious sunset it was. 

Fun fact: the city was proclaimed as Australia's first inland one by Queen Victoria in 1863

On Saturday morning I drove the remaining 2 hours north toward the yard where I tested for the job. unfortunately I didn't get the job. But I had a fun ride, new experience and a shower before heading back off. The time not straight home. As I now had time to explore more and make it an actual road trip I, obviously, opted for the scenic route. This kept me off the highway for over 50k and through wonderfull south western edge of the Sydney Basin.

Back to Goulburn, where this big Merino ram stands his ground as a monument to the local wool industry. 

And through to Gunning, a charming tiny town with a free camping spot next to Meadow creek. Here I set up camp, only to realise that I recognised this place however vaguely. And so it turned out I had indeed been here before, again almost 4 years previously at the end of January 2015, as I drove out of Canberra I also found this charming town with it's free camping area. 

Having gone through a cold night previously in Goulburn, I decided to buy a doona. As I would eventually need one and love a warm bed at night. (And let's face it, nobody likes waking up in the multiple times in the night from the cold knowing you're already wearing everything you can to keep you warm)

Needless to say I was extremely happy with my beautiful camping spot and a warm bed. And to top that off the next morning I headed into town and had the absolute best breakfast burrito and flat white everrrrr.

Only down part was the weather, talking about if its just a sandstorm or wild fires coming through kind of freaked me out for a second there I must admit.

But a conversation with the owners of the cafe and some googling later, we established it must just be a sandstorm. And so, I set of into a sandstorm.

Nala on the Gundagai view point hill

Which obviously cleared up pretty fast after a couple hours drive. As i wasn't in any hurry to get back home i decided to take all other scenic drives south, turns out though there weren't too much of them going in, even the general direction i needed to go. But i still stopped in loads of little towns and drove up to scenic views points. Australia is really good at this, setting up scenic viewpoints that is. And so i was reminded that the best view points are to be reached in second or even first gear uphill drives. 

The rest of the drive home was long, hot and through a lot of emptiness. Stopping in all the little and bigger towns I drove through for a break to stretch my legs made it a great end to the very first road trip!

a beautiful spot along the Murrumbidgee
river in Wagga Wagga

Once home and working at the vet clinic again I set to build an actual home out of Nala.

 Step one was to build a bed in the back. the main structure of my little home.

Let me tell you now, it was one hell of an adventurous afternoon !

As I had little to no experience in building stuff like this, I am ever so great full for the friends I have back there for I was able to use their drill, saw, electric screwdriver ect. 

So in an afternoon I had my bed/main structure fit in and I couldn't've been more proud of myself for putting it all together myself.

Bed✔

table & chair✔

pots, pans and everything nice (for cooking)✔

And off we went !!

The start of our great adventure together up the beautiful east coast 🙌🌊

Next on the blog, up and over the Aussie Alps and to Mallacoota. And hopefully it's not going to take me another month to write that up haha. I've got soooo much to tell you and so much more exciting things to come!!

xoxo Liz

Lizzies aussie adventures, remasterd

And so it started once again,

I was back on Australian ground. 
I had reached my goal of returning as soon as I had my degree.

Melbourne, Oct 2018

After living toward this day for a good 3 years I was equally excited as scared.

 What if everything had changed? what if I didn't recognise the city I once grown to love so much? 
what if I had glorified everything in my head so much I would be disappointed by reality?

But it hadn't, the city was still as wonderfully full as when I left it 1222 days previously. For which I was grateful. 

QVM views

I'll forever love Melbourne, the city just gets me. It's always been there for me, through the good the bad and the ugly. 

Needless to say I was so glad to be back, and for a couple of days everything was bliss. I was able to show someone from home the city I'd been talking about for so long. 

So together we explored this wonderfull city. Going back to familiar places for me like the awesome Queen Victoria Market, which is an absolute MUST if you're in Melbourne. Even for a day. 

This huge partly indoor but completely covered market truely has everything you could need or want. Endless rows of fresh fruit and veggies, a labyrinth of meat and fish as well as a hall filled with cheese, breads and all kind of other prepared goodies. And on the other side you can shop your hart out finding things from real leather belts, shoes or jackets to a pet bird and all it's needs. 

Books for Cooks

Around the outside you'll find a bookshop called, 'Books for Cooks'. So naturally, as I was traveling with a chef, we HAD TO go check that out. About a gazillion books  neatly stacked in shelves just about everywhere you looked and all about, you guessed it, food. 

It was quite the sight to see.

Basically we spend out time eating a lot of food and drinking coffee everywhere, walking for hours all over the place and chilling on the beach in St Kilda. 

Next up for me was to get back to my beloved horse-life. Which I did where I had done it before, in northern Victoria.

Victorian bushland, Oct - Dec 18

And so I stepped on that 3 hour bus that would take me to Kyabram, where it all started 4 years ago. 

But I was back in the horse world, the reason I had worked so hard for those past 3 years at uni. 

I was so happy to see this rascal  (<---) again! The cutie on the left here is Wilson, The last horse I worked on in Aus 4 years ago when Steve plucked him of a paddock and we worked on him to be able to get the vet in safely to castrate this beauty.

Needless to say I was extremely happy to learn he was still there and I was able to help with breaking him in further! I learnt so much from this kid in the 5 weeks I had the honour to work with him. He's a lot of work but he's so willing to work if you do it right.  

Oh how I missed these country sunsets

hay season

roundyard views

 

Equine dentist @ work

I will be forever great full for all the things this family has done for me, when I first met them 4 years ago and then when I went back now all over again. 

Spending my days working with the horses and the evenings eating, drinking, talking and laughing,  Playing games, meeting new people. 

And sure, not everything was as I had thought it would be in my head but then again, it never is. So life was pretty damn good there at that time.

After a month of chilling with the horses and chilling in general I got a job as a vet nurse (again thanks to Steve and Charlotte obvs)/ My very first job in Aus and as a vet nurse and all !!

 

So I went from left to right 4 days a week. 

It was such a great experience to be able to work in a vet clinic. I learned so much from the head vet and the other vet nurses in such a short period of time its insane. 

newborns at the clinic after my very first cesarean
on my first day of work

Chilli

Annelies

So for a few weeks I was living the life, working with animals 24/7 on duty soaking up so much information about how everything works in a vet clinic here and after hours or on days off working with the horses at Steve and Charlottes'. 

long live those days we had 25odd kitties in for spading

Kyabram is a great little country town. Right in-between the bigger cities of Shepparton and Echuca it's rural but still quite easily accessible (for aussie standards of course). The town also has a great fauna park which is always worth wandering around through. It has a walk-through aviary and kangaroo's and emu's jumping and walking around freely, needless to say it's a great day trip for all round.

taking out the girls for some exercise

land of irrigation

So northern Victoria is essentially irrigation and dairy land. Because it rains so little farmer have to rely on irrigation to get stuff growing there. Even though I had lived in this region for over 4 months in the past I hadn't actually seen the process in action. Except for the first fase where you order the water and open your little gate to let the water enter the channels across your property. 

The goal is to basically flood a certain amount of land so that crops can grow. To control the flooding you work with check banks along your fields so that you can regulate the flood as such. It really is multiple days worth of hard work job. the day before the water arrives you have to make sure the channels are closed off in the right places and that there are "gaps" allowing water to flow in between each check bank. When the water starts flowing into your own channels (usually around 5 am) you have to make sure it is indeed flowing and that the channels are clear for them to fill up efficiently. And then you have to check up on the process every few hours to close up the first check banks as they will have gotten flooded first as to give the last check bank a chance to get flooded completely as well.  

This was such a weird concept, to literally flood your own paddocks to be able to grow crops out of it. But in the hours and days following the transformation of those two paddocks we irrigated was amazing.  They went from so dry and dusty to lush, healthy growing crops in such short time. 

Safe to say that that was a real Aussie-bushlife experience for me. 

And with the memory of yet another beautiful sunset I'll talk to you soon about my dearest Nala and our adventures on the road !

xoxo Liz