No mail today. Manjimup (April 2015)

Jolmer was set out to do some locum work in Manjimup. On our way there we paid a short visit to Mount Franklin National Park: a short stroll to a nice lookout platform.  More Karris to be seen. From the information display there is also another 600 meter walkway to the summit. How hard can it be? It didn’t say however that the route would take us a couple hundred meters up, although I feel I should have been able to figure it out.

Never nice to get confronted with your own lack of fitness while the children are chatting and joking away as if this climb is like walking on any flat surface. How do they do that?

At the top is a fire watch and weather station. The low hanging clouds formed a spectacular vista. Worth the climb, worth a sweaty shirt underneath my rain coat and worth a little extra deodorant. Who cares?

The work in Manjimup that was in the pipeline eventually never came through. Unfortunately we asked the school of distant education to send the work for next term to Manjimup and when we arrived there the mail had not.

It started to rain and we needed to hang around a couple of days until after the weekend.

Greenbushes is where we set up camp: it’s a free site in the midst of the towns sport facilities. We parked right next to the tennis courts because we figure there is the least amount of mud at the time we need to drive out again.

Good thing we brought tennis rackets. Between showers the children got out on the court and had a lot of fun.

On Monday still no mail.  We cannot contact the school for a tracking number because of the school holidays. Jolmer is also awaiting the arrival of a surfboard. Apparently you cannot ask the post office to hold anything that is larger than a certain standard size, so we’re redirecting the surfboard. But the schoolwork has to get collected once it arrives. We give it one more day. 

Tuesday I drive the children in the bus to Donnybrook and Jolmer drives to Manjimup: one of the two boxes arrived. By now we are almost on a first-name basis with the staff at the Manjimup post office and the team from the help desk phone line. Because we have no tracking number we have no idea where the second box is. Most likely it will arrive later.

Donnybrook in the meantime is a fantastic place, known for a lot of apple growers producing delicious fruits, and, more importantly, Australia’s largest public playground. Ignoring the rain, promising the children hot chocolate should they get soaking wet, we enter the fun park, amazed by the variety of equipment. The Flying Fox in Kerang is still the number one Flying Fox so far, but the rest of the play area is just a lot of fun, and indeed the best playground in Australia. I am being challenged to play tag in the giant web, no worries there. Then I’m challenged to go on the purple slide, which proves much more tricky. It doesn’t have a normal set of stairs to take you to the top of the slide, but a narrow winding tube. As I am trying hard not to get stuck I can hear Peter at the top talk to a newfound friend: “I am waiting for my mum, she is very big”. Not helping.