The one with the holiday in glorious Western Australia

Ahh the sun setting in the west. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. And while I’ve been saying it for years to my hubby, this is the first time he’s acknowledged that I am right about it. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. But I wanted to start with a beautiful picture and Monkey Mia is certainly lovely.

We were essentially forced to holiday in WA because of my father’s estate. Despite insisting (and hoping desperately) that she would qualify for a loan, my sister is unable to buy Dad’s house. To be honest I’d have been shocked if she did. She’s hardly worked her whole life, instead choosing to have children and live off the govt payments. And she has a drug habit, which I hate, but have come to accept as something she’ll probably never throw. Sadly, it’s not a drug that she can really overdose on, or this would have been over one way or another years ago. She would have ODed or hit rock bottom and got clean. So instead she oscillates from user to not, according to events in her life and how much money she has.

Anyway, the sad conclusion is that the house must be sold. We’d love to keep it ourselves, but we live on the wrong coast for it to be any real use to us. A four-hour flight plus a three-hour drive does not make a weekend getaway. So we decided to spend a week of our holiday cleaning it out and preparing it for sale. We thought it would be a big job, but we were shocked at the state of it when we got there.

You see, I had told my sister that she should take her children there for a seaside holiday before it was prepped for sale. And she basically trashed the place. A three-day job turned into a five-day nightmare because of the five bags of unwashed clothing and linen she left there, the dog sh*t all over the floor (INSIDE) and the unwashed dishes (a lot of which went straight in the bin). Like everything in her life, she had a little disaster which left the dog locked in on his own for four days and when she returned to get him, she had to turn around and leave straight away without cleaning up the mess. The less said about it the better. Except that she also took a lot of the stuff that was valuable and I imagine, pawned it.

Darren was a brick through all this. It broke my heart going back there to sell the house. And going back there knowing Dad wouldn’t be sitting at his table waiting for us as well. The new Indian Ocean Drive has opened up – finally – and it was a lovely and easy drive up there. Dad spent years talking about “when the road comes through” and how much prices would go up and how much easier it would be to get there. Well it opened less than a month after he died. He never saw it.

Sunset at Jurien Bay.

I have to rave about how I love that town. Everyone was sympathetic and helpful. For city folk (which they continually called us), it was truly lovely to have people help for no other reason than to be helpful, to refer us to others if they could help more and generally be all round nice people. Also, the weather was AMAZING. It’s winter. Well, it was late Autumn at the time. And the days were sunny and 23C or more, the whole week. Thankfully. As Dad had a huge double shed full of crap and we filled two 6m skip bins of rubbish from the house and shed. And still left the shed half-filled with stuff for my sister as she feels a lot of stuff Dad had is nicer than what she currently has.

So anyway, after a week of beautiful weather while we worked until we fell over (literally), and I struggled to sleep because of the emotional stress, the weather turned on us when we finally got to drive off on our holiday.

We saw this on the way. We dream of becoming Grey Nomads before we are actually grey. I’ve been tossing up the idea of using the money from Dad’s house to make it happen – we’re both due long service leave in five years, so we can take six months without losing our jobs, which is pretty awesome.

(holiday story TBC tomorrow. I have to go to bed now)