We are home now.
We planned to keep on travelling north for the next week or two, but the prediction of very heavy rainfall has caused us to rethink.

Every location we planned to visit is expected to get a thorough and penetrating drenching. It will be chucking down. There will be local flooding, there may be storms and hail.

The condition of the ground at most free campsites we have seen is already soft and supersaturated, and the risk of getting bogged down would be high.

So as we were passing pretty close to Canberra on our way north anyways, we thought it prudent to turn for home, hunker down for a while and wait it out.

The drive home was eye-opening.
I have never seen these now familiar parts of Australia looking so green.

The grasses were thick and high and verdant. Crops of canola splashed intense yellow cubist blocks amongst it all. Rivers and creeks were full to overflowing. The expected trickles were wild and (in places) intimidating.

It seems my accustomed Aussie colour palate of desiccated browns and dry greens that are somehow also brown, has been deep faked with scenes from New Zealand or the Pacific North West.

Hunker down. Home again to catch up on Netflix, and look for a gap in the rain to mow the lawn (that is as high as an elephant’s eye), and work our way through a large asteroid-sized accumulation of dirty laundry.

And we’ve been talking.
We haven’t decided to the point of commitment yet. But we think we might sell Ripley after all.
Over the last 5 years, we have now travelled to most of the places of interest that asphalt can take us. Looking back, we have had the best of times, and now we want to dig deeper. We want to explore the more inaccessible hidden places, the destinations we look at but dare not venture to in the front-wheel drive, low-clearance Ripley.

We shall talk some more.

Featured image by Inge Maria