30/07/26 Melbourne to Seymour

-
Reluctant to pay for months of accommodation, I bounced around house sits in Melbourne as BD bounced around the Royal Melbourne Hospital, through ICU, HDU, CCU, and a veritable avalanche of medical acronyms. Every day after visiting hours finished I dragged my weary self home to clean Guinea pig cages (Bentleigh East), console needy cats (Hughesdale), and walk exuberantly friendly dogs (Bentleigh and Alphington). 


BD joined me and we crashed her little transit wheelchair over cobbles on our daily visit to HITH (another acronym!) where I took lessons in wound care. Along the way we collected a swag of medical accessories: bed stick, toilet frame, shower stool, walking stick, knee brace. I packed the car like the tetris pro I was.


On Thursday morning we dragged ourselves free of Melbourne's centrifugal force, put on our brand new Grandma/Auntie hats, and took to the road, Sydney-bound. There was a brand new baby in Sydney just waiting to be cuddled, kissed, and generally doted upon.

I coudn't say I was a fan of big-city traffic but nevertheless we made it out of Melbourne in one piece and stopped in Kilmore for a quick walk around the local park. The ground was wet with recent rains and bright green grass glowed on the hills outside town.



Epic travellers that we were, we made it all the way to the Wattle Motel in Seymour, where the proprieter had very kindly turned on the heater for us. I left BD to rhapsodise over the size of the TV, and went for a walk down to the river. A fat kangaroo watched me as I walked, and the bushes twittered with clouds of wrens, the boys all dressed up in bright blue breeding plumage.


Back at the motel I made a cup of tea and enjoyed my motel biscuits.  BD popped the last antibiotic pill and had maltesers to celebrate. We both took a deep breath, drew a line under the whole hospital saga, and went to bed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

About Chooks.

-
Image
Here we are looking after Big Fluffy while his humans go gallivanting overseas. Big Fluffy is a dog and as such he's needy: he needs walks, people time, food, someone to chase him inside when he morphs into Barky McBarkface, etc etc  We've looked after dogs that couldn't be left outside and needed a human to let them out every couple of hours to do business which humans (us) then had to pick up.   Obligatory Big Fluffy photo. Big Fluffy is not a cat.  Cats exist on a higher plane, deigning to grant to humans the privilege of attending to their needs and accepting with graciousness a lap to lie on, regular food, and preferably a little outside time and a warm spot in winter.   Given a water bubbler, an automatic feeder, and a decent kitty litter setup a cat could be left alone overnight or even for a weekend.  "We don't care," cat owners chirp blithely, "Just leave some food and head out for the weekend."  Which, being the responsible little house ...
Read more

Railway Scones

-
Image
The Railway Museum at Milang inhabited a collection of old carriages overlooking Lake Alexandrina. Staffed entirely by volunteers, it celebrated all things light rail: the forgotten little railways that hauled things between mines and around industrial sites without any of the kudos and fanfare of the suburban and intercity networks.   In a fine example of procrasti-snacking, we took ourselves to the Railway Museum for afternoon tea rather than face sorting through stuff in the storage shed. A group of jolly geriatric hikers had just finished scoffing their scones and vacated their seats for us.  "They all live on the other side of the Peninsula," confided the walk leader. "But I live on this side so I organised a walk and made them come over the hill."   "We walk once a month," chimed in a tiny little lady with a big backpack. "But the walks get slower as we get older."  Not that they looked particularly slow to me as they bounced down the steps...
Read more

13/09/25 Uptown Downtown Old Town in Luxembourg

-
Image
Warning: photo spam ahead. Just like in Brugge, life in Luxembourg ran with a backing track of bells, starting bright and early at 7am. Some of them I understood although the number of dongs didn't always seem to match the hour of the day. Other times the bells burst to life for no reason that I could understand, giving a prompt to pause and appreciate whatever beautiful view was in front of me at the time Luxembourg had a low old town down in the river gorge, and a high old town up on the plateau and promontory where the fortress used to be. Low old town #1 Low old town #2 Low old town #3 Luxembourg had bits of new town scattered around too, but nobody was interested in those because they were pretty much the same as any other modern town. High level bridges spanned the gorge at regular intervals to connect the upper denizens of Luxembourg, and a glass lift and funicular railway provided connection on a vertical plane. Of course you could go up and down by car, bicycle, and shanks...
Read more