Technological unpleasantness!

 27/12/2012
 Yesterday we were home alone, today we were hosts to my brother Stephen, his wife Charlotte and two friends of theirs who we know quite well from he boat club, Graham and Arlene. Our visitors did not arrive until 2pm so we were able to get our jobs done around the place and prepare the late afternoon lunch. I am using the “Royal We” here as I had very little to do with the meal. We were cooking lamb joints (thanks to Centrals meat raffles) but I wasn’t confident it could be done properly on our dilapidated BBQ, I wanted to do them in the oven in the kitchen. Jane took control, made a nice salad, a superb fruit platter, the likes of which you would struggle to prepare if you live anywhere outside of the tropics. Then, she cooked perfect lamb on the barby……hopefully I am redundant, but somehow, I don’t think so.
 We all had a few pre lunch beers and a cool off in the pool , then later had another pool party, but this time it was the blokes only and a game of pool on the snooker table in the bar. An excellent day enjoyed by everyone.

  28/12/2012
   An up and down sort of a day, with honours about even on the good news/ bad news. Most of the day has been so frustrating, as we (Jane) tried desperately to change our Aussie phone server, Vodaphone to Telstra. A straight forward exchange of sim cards, or so you would think Vodaphone, the most useless server in Australia, with minimum coverage, has had to go. When we drive the 5,500k  across Australia to Perth we need a reasonable network in case of emergency.
 So, first we must unlock our phone from Vodaphone, which we can do on line except they wouldn’t accept our credit card as it was foreign (Barclaycard) A visit, twice to our local big shopping mall and the Telstra shop where we were advised it was simple to do the swap and duly and came away with the sim card and a recharge voucher for $30.
 Back home we find we have we have no phone network as it takes 24hours to change the number over, this after an our of live “chat” online with a Telstra operative to activate the card. Right now we haven’t got an Aussie phone that’s briefly what went on all day.
  Evening brought us to Centrals where we met with our house swap buddies, Frank and Julie. Good news, they have more or less finalised their plans and we can move into their house any time after 1st July 2013 for 3 months. At the club our run of luck continued as we won $50 on the club name card and another monumental meat tray of beef snags, rissoles, a half leg of pork and some chops. Altogether the phone episode has cost over $50,we have won over $100 of  prizes. The only thing we can’t do is eat the bloody phone!


 29/12/2012
  24 hours later and the phone still doesn’t work, so off we go again to Smithfied shopping mall to speak to the very nice young man in the Telstra shop who waved his magic wand over it and, hey presto, the little black beast becomes an all singing and all dancing phone. Seems we were putting in the wrong code to unlock the sod. In fairness the numbers were correct, just didn’t see the star icon between the numbers.
 That mission accomplished we (gluttons for punishment) set about even more scary technology by booking flights on line for our return trip next year, and we have done it! That was despite having three attempts at confirming our Barclaycard secure password. We were required to punch in the 3rd 4th and 5th letters and of course we can’t count. Anyway, all good!  Once all that technological unpleasantness was out of the way we nipped up to Palm Cove for a couple of beers then BBQ’d  our pork chops and sorted a few more beers out. We sat on the deck to eat and had to put the portable fan on full bore as it’s just so humid with little breeze in the evening. It was a lovely fresh 26C at 6am this morning.

 30/12/2012
  Even more techno brilliance this morning as we surfed the net for some sort of caravanette to cart us around New Zealand…..when we eventually get there. Well, perhaps not so brilliant, we think we have found the van for the job, now it’s a case of availability and booking it online. Anyway, at this point, time was pressing and the bus from Yorkey’s Knob was on it’s way to pick us up so we switched off the shiny thing until tomorrow when we will make a serious effort to book something. At this rate I can see us pedalling around N Z on push bikes or on a horse and cart.
It’s Sunday and usually have the Millers round for early evening drinks and nibbles but they have been out all day. Phil and Julie were at a loose end so they came over instead. We had a lovely evening chatting about future travels and visits to one another and concluded all things are possible.