Weekly Photo Challenge : Forward

Here they come, here they come…

It is March 2010 and we are setting off on our round Australia trip. The first stop from home was Stanthorpe. The annual apple and grape festival weekend was in full swing.

Then on the Saturday of the big street parade it rained 😦

But did this dampen anyone’s enthusiasm? No way. Out came the raincoats, up went the umbrellas and every one looked forward to the parade.

Redlands Ladies Band

The rain wasn’t going to stop this parade..,

 

Striding manfully forward pipes playing, kilts swirling…

It was also St Patrick’s weekend

 

They may need this to get home in…

These are only a few of the participants in the parade. Every club and sporting body had a float and there were at least 6 bands interspersed between them and marching girls, clowns, dancers and acrobats cavorting to the music. It took almost 30 minutes for the parade to pass by. Fantastic fun.

It was a great weekend and a memorable start to our one year, 37,000 kilometre road trip.

We were also looking forward to this trip of a life-time.

 

 

 

Rain and more rain….

Waiting in anticipation for the big parade.

Here she is, the Festival Princess with her fashion accesory of umbrella…

Note the age of all these hot shot ladies.

Waiting in anticipation for the big parade.

Raining but not bothering us. We togged up into raincoats and with the neccessary accesory of umberellas we enjoyed the big festival and street parade at Stanthorpe.

WordPress lesson on inserting google maps

As we travel around I would like to be able to put a map of the area we are in. So I went to the WordPress support area to see if it could be done and found the answer was “yes”

So this is a map of the first leg of our trip.. It will be March 4th before we leave but I am getting excited about the thought of going as it is now getting so close.

We have not made any plans as to where we will go after Stanthorpe, and this will be a first for me, as usually, when I travel, I like to plan things almost to the second and have an itinerary worked out months in advance. This time it will be a very broad plan of which direction we will head and leave the details to chance…

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How to insert Google maps

Google Maps

Embeds, Google, Maps, Shortcode

You can easily embed Google Maps into your WordPress.com blog.

1) Visit Google Maps.

2) Type in any street address or geographic location and click Search Maps.

3) Once your map is fully loaded, click on the Link option found on the top right of the map area.

4) A popup will appear, as illustrated below.

5) Place your mouse cursor in the text box titled Paste HTML to embed in website. The code will begin with <iframe. Copy the code.

6) In your WordPress.com dashboard, go to Posts->Add New or Pages->Add New (or open an existing post/page in editing mode). Paste the code directly into your visual editor.

7) Click Save Draft, Update, or Publish depending on the status of your post or page. You will notice that the code has changed. WordPress has converted the HTML code into the working shortcode.

Date is set and we will be on our way….

I can hardly believe it, suddenly the time has slipped round and we have a firm date and, more importantly, some where to go.

Every thing has fallen into place so seamlessly that it seems we were meant to do this trip at this time.

The gradual working through “the list” culminated last weekend when we welcomed Hamish and partner, with 2-year-old son, into our life and our home. They answered our advert for a house to rent, along with  a number of others, but they seemed so perfect for our house we were very pleased when they decided they would like to move in. They had just spent 6 months travelling round Australia, another coincidence, and needed some where to move into immediately. That created 5 days of furious activity to finish moving the last of things into the flat, full top to bottom clean of the house, including touch up painting in one bedroom, and a major clean out of the garage.

Phew……

But now we are almost ready, just a few loose ends to tidy up. Then another couple of  coincidences, a friend asked if we could house sit for a week while they were on holiday. The date, FEBRUARY 24th has now become our “D” day(departure day). Another friend told us about the Stanthorpe apple and grape festival on March 5th, 6th, 7th.  “Of course,” John said, “it will be hard to get accommodation this close to the festival date.” I googled Stanthorpe accommodation and struck gold, we have booked into Sommerville Valley tourist Park. 

 March 5th is our combined birthday, what a good day to be on the way…

26 days to the start of our gypsy life….