The day started with Daddy driving to a garage to get the car battery changed at 6:30. We washed up our breakfast things in the bathroom –there was no kitchen-and filled up our drink bottles from the bath. Then I dried everything with a face-washer. It was raining when we left the Motor Inn with me driving, the road was fairly calm, and I got good experience using the windscreen wipers on all their settings.

We listened to audio books and lost phone reception as well as Grandma and Grandpa. They had been ahead of us and we couldn’t see how we could have got in front of them. So we did a few laps of the town, got petrol and decided that they must have gone on to the next town so we would follow them. Then there they were! They had stopped for a while in the town before and then thought they were still in front of us so had waited just outside the town for us. Luckily we had both got sick of waiting at the same time and met each other. We got phone reception and got a message from them saying “Where are you?” so we said “Here.”

I found out that polite drivers still exist. I was yes about to have to merge again and there were two cars about to pass me.  I was waiting for the second to pass and the lane was running out (again). Then I realized the second car was waiting for me! So I merged. Thanks nice person whoever you were.

Grandpa bought us more ice-creams, which we ate while watching a ferry. We had crossed into Victoria and then into South Australia and the time changed. When we got to the house we were going to stay in for the next few days, Daddy forgot the code of the alarm and it went off. That alarm was so noisy! We stood around while he tried to remember it, with our fingers in our ears and people walking past staring at us.

We only had a few problems with the house: the floor squeaked like crazy at every step in most of the house, it was right next to a highway that had trucks and cars braking and accelerating on it all the time. This meant that everyone had to talk that little bit louder to be heard and the bathroom did not have a drain hole in the floor, which meant when any of the water in the shower hit the walls of the room ran out onto the floor and made a huge at least 1 cm deep pool. If your clothes happened to be lying on the floor they got totally drenched along with any bags that might be there too!

When my brothers were put to bed one of them was missing his toy “Dogger.” So we spent ages looking for it, everywhere (except where it was of course). Until finally I remembered that earlier they had told me their toys were sleeping in the pillows.......... “Dogger” was inside his pillow.  

Bad sleep. O lovely trucks and cars....... Out we go to brave the Adelaide traffic, which as we have seen is crazy! One thing is that here people don’t keep left unless overtaking; the slow people drive wherever they feel like driving. It also seems that using indicators when merging or turning is not fashionable. From our window we counted 4 out of 8 and then 13 out of 43 that did not put their indicators on, when turning off the highway across the traffic!!!!

We drove to our cousin’s place. I watched the rain falling, sending thousands of round ripples across the black roads surface and watched droplets racing down the window. There is something pretty about the reflections of all the car headlights, making golden-silver trails on the road that grow fainter as they lengthen. Then there are also the pinky-red rays that trail along behind the cars. We spent the day chatting, reading and looking at stuff on Grandpa’s iPhone, or at least I did. We played a game of ‘Pass the Pig’ and I actually won! Probably the fact that Daddy stopped playing in the middle of the game helped, as he has won nearly all -or maybe all- the games of Pass the Pig that I can remember.

We drove back through the dark, in the rain. When we got back to the noisy house that night we hung out the load of washing we had put on that morning and started another which took two hours to finish! We creaked around the house and to bed and talked in bed for ages and made up silly lyrics for songs, well we changed a few words of some songs to make them silly and then sung them.