Farewell to Bluey and Hello to Hughie

After five years of adventures, the time came last week to put faithful Bluey, our Ford Transit Motorhome, on the market.

 A lovely octogenarian couple full of verve and enthusiasm for adventure won our hearts and Bluey. We offered to deliver the purchase to the buyers' home in Old Bar, New South Wales.

Bluey, as befits a Transit, changed gender as the octogenarians changed his name to Flo as in Go with the Flow.

 Our last trip with Bluey was great fun as ever, taking us through Charters Towers, Emerald, Surat, across New England to Inverell, and Port Macquarie.

Early in the trip, we survived an encounter with an inattentive truck driver swerving crazily over the road straight toward us. Later, we came across drovers with a huge mob of cattle thronging the road and blocking traffic as cows fed small calves right in front of a massive road train. Yay, Australia!

At one of our lunch stops we came across an echidna who played peek-a-boo with us whilst snuffling ants.

We adjusted slowly to being without own transport and overnighting in a caravan park cabin. Next day, we took a taxi to Port Macquarie airport. Whilst looking for a burger, Gen kept nudging me saying there's Macca...I looked and looked and contested that there was no McDonald's, just a KFC...but Gen had spotted the Facebook Outback celebrity Macca in his trademark blue shirt and wide brimmed hat, so she went over to share some of his trademark wry humour.

We then flew to Brisbane to visit Les who is going to do the internal conversion of Hughie, our soon to be Toyota Coaster Motorhome. Les showed us some coasters he was converting and we ran through all the wishlist items we could and couldn't squeeze into Hughie. Next day we were picked up by an enthusiastic Steve, production manager at the nearby 4x4 engineering workshop where Hughie was first being kitted out with our chosen 4wd equipment. We received a guided tour of all Hughie's workings whilst he was on the hoist, awaiting, amongst other things, a new set of Super Single wheels. Fingers crossed, Hughie will be off the hoist in very early May and we expect delivery of the internal conversion by Les in late June.

At the end of the long and exciting day we hopped on a flight and celebrated with wine and nibbles all the way back to Cairns where we landed at 8pm at 29C.