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Long Thursday

Wednesday night we returned the car at Melbourne airport and they gave us a lift over to our hotel. We were up at 4 AM on Thursday and made it to the airport in time to catch the earlier flight to Sydney. (When we postponed our departure from Melbourne for a week, we could not get on the direct MEL-LAX flight.) The earlier flight gave us an extra hour for the connection in Sydney to the LAX flight, and we needed every minute of it. We were able to get isle seats, about 10 rows apart, and I was in the second last row in the 747. Fortunately the stewardess in that area was a hoot, and considered the seats in the tail to be "the other first class" and treated us accordingly. Her name was "Si"

Arrived in LA on time at about 6:30 AM Thursday (having crossed the international dateline) and had to wait 6 hours for our SW flight at 12:30 PM. The typical SW route was via El Paso and Houston, we arrived at in Charleston at 11 PM and Kylie was waiting or us. We were in bed by 12:30 AM after a 32 hour "day".

Friday was a bit of a fog, we did pick up a rental car and visit Mason (and Kylie and Ryan)

Saturday we took stock of work on the house and received an invoice from the contractor. His bill was about 35% higher than budget and he only had about 1/2 the work done. The price of absentee management.

Sunday we started working on the house ourselves, mainly just cleaning up mess. I told the contractor to finish up the tiling, that Deidre and I would do the rest. Monday and Tuesday we installed a new garage door opener, patched, sanded and painted.

Obviously Tide Hiker was not happy about being abandoned and is punishing us. We tried to change the oil Sunday afternoon only to discover that the oil change pump will not operate. Yesterday the A/C shut down and after a bit of messing around discovered there was no cooling water flowing thru the hull. That took a couple of sweatie hours to sort out. Today we took her over for a pump out and noticed no depth finder. When will it end, I already have a long list.