Saturday – G’Day Bruce

Another early day we were going to look at cars and buy a fridge so we could buy food and someone was coming to clean the house, once again we were up and off, this morning we went for a Mc Breakfast, only because it is a wireless hotpot ($14.00 for one hour) you understand, not because we like McDonalds, well unless it is for a hangover cure. We ate breakfast and looked for second hand electrical and cheap furniture, either in stores or being sold privately, we also looked for cars, now we have moved we really do need a car.

I think I have said before cars are very expensive here, because of this we want to novate with a lease through Jason’s company as it gives us a really good tax break, thus not costing as much in the long run, we also get a fuel card and all maintenance is covered, all this adds up to quite a few things less for us to worry about. But of course this all comes at quite a high monthly cost, but as we have no credit rating as yet getting a loan for the car would also be high, so we don’t have much choice really. The lease has certain stipulations naturally, one of which is that the car cannot be any older than a 2004, I don’t want high mileage as I will be doing lots of miles going round in circles with my lack of direction, or should I say kilometres as they are called here.
Trying to find a car at no more than $13,500, which was the budget we had set (approx £6500) no older than 2004 and with low Km’s and 5 full seat belts was virtually impossible.

After breakfast we came back to the house with our list of addresses and let the cleaner Andrew in, while he was here, the man came to connect our phone, thank goodness for that, without a phone number we cannot order broadband and without broadband we have no internet, even when you have ordered broadband it can take up to 2 weeks to be connected apparently, we left Andrew with a key, well it isn’t as if we have anything valuable to steal and set off to see the first car at Ferntree Gully, it was miles, sorry kilometres away, we did have sat nav and the lady wanted us to go via the M3, the M3 is a new motorway which hasn’t even opened yet, so she kept taking us round in circles trying to get us on the right road, I had the Melways with us and found a road which would take us straight on to the highway we needed to be on, but Jason chose to listen to the stupid machine and we went round in circles again , not a good start to the day as the Melways nearly went out of the window with my frustration.

At the garage we were met by Bruce, we had a look at the car and it was Ok and he was prepared to negotiate on the price a little, but only if we put a $500 deposit down there and then, we had other cars to look at, had been told by the lease company that we didn’t have to do anything other than tell them the car we wanted (think they are used to people buying brand new), we did have cash with us but that was for my fridge and hopefully a washing machine. There is no launderette close by so I would have to take it on the bus unless we bought one, even though ours is on the way from the UK.

We just walked away after another argument, the car was manual rather than automatic which I would prefer having never driven an automatic, when I said I wanted manual, Jason was not impressed as I had not mentioned this before, my theory was that he would know this as I have never driven an automatic – Men !.

It was now after one, as we were close to Richmond we headed to a furniture shop which also does rentals and was having an ex rental sale, this was easy to find luckily but the shop must have sold all the decent stuff as I wouldn’t let the dog on half of it, it was now getting late and we were aware that there is no such thing as late night shopping here, off back down the Nepean highway to BIG W for some toilet brushes, soap dishes and anything else we could think of, on our way we noticed a shop called the Good Guys for electrical, it was worth a look, we found a washer for $299 and also a fridge/freezer for $399, as we had the kids in the car we wouldn’t be able to get these items in too, so decided to come back the next day, thank goodness for the 4 wheel drive. We called at TGI’s for tea which was nice, before going home and watching the Simpsons DVD on Jason’s lap top before bed, what an exciting life we lead.