Believe it or not, I hate change. Actually, I suspect what I really hate is moving from one house to the next. Just absolutely loathe it. Anyone who has followed my blogs over the years will not be surprised to learn that I spent all day yesterday -- our first day of our Australian adventure -- nesting into our van. This effort required a lot of unpacking. A lot of shopping. A lot of moving things from one place to another. It involved dragging DrC to stores and making him put stuff together and take stuff apart and find stuff and decide things and do a bit. And then the sun went down and I fell into a deep sleep exhausted beyond all hope of recall. 

On the up side, packing us into this van is reminiscent of the boat... But even better it's like packing four ten year olds into a tiny treehouse. The effort requires tremendous ingenuity sprinkled with a large dash of creativity. DrC and I are going to have one enormous challenge -- not fixing everything. We are tempted to fix things. We want to make it just right. However, we are not going to be in the damn thing long enough to make it truly comfortable. Somewhere between not doing a damn thing and installing solar panels and a regulator between the house and starter battery complete with diode so you can at least charge the house while driving... Okay stop.

This morning I woke up at 5:15 local. To be fair,  I usually get up at 5:45 local and that's two time zones away so I actually slept in. This morning birds woke me up and a cool dawn breeze that you only feel in the tropics right before the sun crests the hills and starts to bake everything into a soggy torpor. I slipped out of the van in my long pale green night shirt emblazoned in shiny silver letters with the imprecation to rise and shine and padded my way through the sleeping campground. The morning was absolutely alive with bird song. I couldn't begin to speculate on the variety and number, but it felt very much like I'd been dropped into a tropical bird exhibit and someone had just put out fruit and bird seed. I sat in the dark and listened to the chorus of breakfast, waiting for DrC to wake, and I pondered where we should store the dirty laundry between campsites. 

There is apparently no romance in my soul. Yet.