What a start to a New Year???

It’s hard to believe that this year has started so wildly.  First the flooding hit Emerald and surrounding areas then moved downstream to Rockhampton and Bundaberg.  Then the rain and flooded rivers moved south and started hitting places like Gympie and Maryborough, and then all Hell broke loose in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley.  I’ve never seen anything like the vision that was shown on the TV – all channels, 24 hours a day for the first 2 days.  It was just terrifying.  And we were safe – not like the residents of these areas who lost not only property, but family members as well.

All in all, last week was an awful, tragic one.  However, Queenslanders being who they are, work is pretty much underway all over to clean-up and rebuild.

We suffered only minor inconvenience in having to move out of the caravan park for three days.  The park owners and police were concerned that Breakfast Creek would back-up and flood because of the king-tides which were due.  In the end, the park did not flood, but there was a small amount of sewage back-up which needed to be cleaned up before anybody could re-enter the park.

We moved a few streets up the hill, and – together with 3 other vans, parked on the side of the street for those days.  The people in the houses where we parked were amazing.  Power, water, use of toilets and showers were all offered almost as soon as we got there.  One person offered the use of her clothes dryer so that we could dry off all the gear that had gotten sodden as we did our emergency pack-up and pull-out.  That one kind act made life on the street so much simpler for us.

Life is now moving on, and tomorrow we head to Buccan, a small community near Beenleigh, south of Brisbane, to take up a 1 month house-sit.  The home and property are just lovely – 3 acres with a huge, comfortable home and two cats to look after.  The owners, Sue and Chris, are wonderful people, and for a while, they really thought they would not be able to go away on holiday.  Not just because of the floods, but also they had a load of earth filling dumped on the rear driveway a couple of weeks ago so they could fill in the old pool area.  Since then it had rained and rained and rained, and the guy with the bob-cat couldn’t shift it.  This meant that the van couldn’t be moved!!!  Disaster!  But, as of today, the bob-cat man is working hard, and all is starting to look good for them to travel.  We’re all keeping our fingers crossed!