Hillbillies

That's what we are apparently.

We have seen quite a few houses and blocks of land by now and every time we can only get really enthousiastic when it's in the hills. Plenty of houses with a nice backyard. Most of them have gumtrees and a bit of grass. It is not unusual to get a local loan-goat from someone else in the neighbourhood to 'cut' the grass. You can't really mow it yourself with all that steepiness!

Suddenly we were in love for a short while with a really nice block of hill-land, including a Skippy trail through the garden and a local Wombat.
So we put on our Sherlock Holmes hats to find out what exactly is involved to start building on it. Hmmm, that looked a bit more complicated than we thought: there's no water connection so that will have to come from rainwater (did we mention the decade low draught?). Also, there's no drain so that will have to be sceptic. And of course it's a 15 minute crawl uphill pitch dark back from the pub.
The final straw came from our new Rock & Roll teacher: his house got complete burned 10 years ago on his birthday in that same area. Extremely high risk of burshfires apparenlty. That's why the area is nicknamed 'the chimney'. The fire brigade doesn't even go there and everbody that lives over there always has a suitcase ready with valuable belongings, just in case...

OK, so we're cured from that, for now anyway.

The fire brigade does intentionally set of a small bushfire as well to burn off some of the dry leaves in a controlled manner (see picture) before they can cause an unscheduled bushfire.

At last ... our stuff

Great, our belongings have made it: they've arrived at last. Better start unpacking then. It took the movers just about 3 hours to unload the truck ... and we thought we shipped a fair amount of furniture! Guess not: the house is quite empty still so we cannot exclude an additional shopping trip.

Life is starting to get a bit more normal now. Peter starts at GM-Holden on Monday. That'll be a though one after 6 months!

We have also started to get fit again and ramble up a hill every other day (together with hundreds of locals). De track is called 'one thousand steps' - een gigantic stairway. Well that's a bit exaggerated of course we thought initially, but after 350 steps we start to change our minds. When we arrive completely knackered at the top at last, we have counted 800 steps! So did we win or lose? Perhaps the Kookabura was laughing at us this time. That first time we were passed by many but after a few weeks of working out, it is our turn.

To supplement our getting fit we got a 'torso man' to slam...