The day dawned bright and clear if a bit chilly. The dust storm has gone away and the sky is clear blue. We drove the hundred odd kilometres to Barraba before lunch.
We set up on on the Samin's driveway and had a cup of tea and a chat. Happy hour was happy and the barbecue went on well into the evening with lots of reminiscences being exchanged.
In the morning, we went into town to do the shopping and check out the town.
After happy hour, we had a very pleasant barbecue with Vicki and John.
We had been impressed by Barraba because it has a really nice feel to it. It is small enough for everyone to know everyone but big enough to have all the necessary facilities including a very well equipped hospital and two dedicated doctors. There are also several other motorhomers who have settled here. Despite the hot summers and the very cold winter nights, we think we might be happy to settle here.
We visited one of the real estate agents in the town and were taken on a tour of all the properties that he had listed, Some were not right for us but three caught our eye.
One by the river (with a significant flood risk) needed a new kitchen and bathroom and complete repaint. On the upside it had room to park several motorhomes in the back yard.
One was a very neat little brick veneer house ready to live in without any work. The downside of this place is that it is located in "Dodge City", the rough end of town. It has room for only one motorhome but that might be seen as an advantage and it certainly has a lot less lawn to look after.
The third one was an old federation house in full brick with very high ceiling. It needs some repair and some modification but it comes with a lot lower asking price. I was very taken by this place probably because it reminded me of one of the houses I lived in when I was a boy. Jean was a bit worried about the amount of work needed but I argued that we could afford to pay someone else to do the work.
In the evening, we were entertained to dinner by Vicki who cooked a delicious roast chicken dinner. We contributed a Xmas pudding with brandy custard and it was all washed down with a bottle of white from John's cellar and a bottle of Banrock Station from our's.
John and Vicki were out all day at a Vietnam Veterans function in Tamworth. Vicki had asked me to write some stuff for the newsletter so I spent the morning doing that.
In the afternoon I tried to email the stuff to Vicki with no success. I rang the Telstra tech and spent some time talking to him without any success. He thought I might be suffering from inadequate signal strength so I drove to the highest point in the town and tried again. There were four bars of signal but still no success. The symptoms seem to change a bit with time so, while I thought the problem was at Telstra, it might be some kind of software problem in the iBook-cellphone arrangement. This has all worked before and MacOS X is supposed to be robust but I guess I'll have to find some strategy to debug my system. I finally put the stuff on a CD-ROM, something I should have tried first.
We had stayed on in Barraba so that we could have another look at the houses with the benefit of advice from John and Vicki. We had already decided against the little house in "Dodge City" so we looked first at the "blue" one by the river.
It is livable as it stands but needs a lot of work on the kitchen, the bathroom, the interior decor, and the awning out the back. We also found out by chatting to a neighbour that there had been problems with the sewer connection. This pretty much put this house in the no category too.
We spent a lot of time in the federation house and concluded that it has much potential for restoration. If done in sensitive way the money spent would more than come back in increased value. There is a fair amount to do but nothing is urgent and the price leaves a deal of money for the restoration work. The only decision that remains is do we want to get into such a project. We feel that this is probably the best chance we'll get to live somewhere like this but we decided to sleep on the decision and come back to Barraba after the Chapter weekend if the we decide to go ahead.
We have to leave tomorrow to get down to Victoria in time to do what we have promised to do so we'll be off tomorrow on a fast transit of about 1200 km (700 miles).