Fed up with playing endless games of Scrabble, Wordle, catching up with correspondence, and just staring at the van’s ever-shrinking four walls, grey nomads in most parts of the country have all been asking themselves the same question … when is it going to end so I can get back to living the dream?
Give or take the odd dry day in the odd lucky location, it seems like it’s pretty much been raining everywhere and it’s been raining forever.
Long-term travellers like Stephen Jones are at their wit’s end. “I like to think I’m a pretty positive person and I know things don’t always run smoothly, but this is just incessant,” he said. “I could handle a few days with a smile on my face, and even a few weeks, but this has been going on for months now, and counting, and it’s wearing me and my aching old bones down … I didn’t sign up for this!”
The frustration of Stephen and other grey nomads in the east is understandable. The last few months has seen flooding in South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, caravans temporarily abandoned on the mud of the Oodnadatta Track, campers marooned in Queensland’s Cape York and, of course, the deluges that have hammered places like Lismore in northern New South Wales and Brisbane and elsewhere have been historically horrific.
And it looks like those in the west are now about to run out of luck with seriously wet weather set to hit there over the next few days.
Meteorologists, of course, warned us that La Niña was going to bring nasty conditions … but even they admit that the weather system has been a surprisingly ‘stubborn influence’.
In better news though, the Bureau of Meteorology is now saying that all but one of its climate models indicate that La Nina is likely to return to neutral conditions by early winter.
Meteorologists are now ‘relatively confident’ that this latest round of rain late in autumn is La Niña’s last hurrah.
However, rain-weary grey nomads like Stephen Jones will believe it when they see it.
“That forecast is nice to hear, of course,” he said. “And I’ll keep my fingers crossed … but I’m not putting the Scrabble in deep storage just yet, let’s put it that way!”
• How have you been coping with the relentless rain? Comment below.
Treated myself to a cabin in Nyngan for 3 days, & watched the Bogan rise. Bliss!!
Hey it’s a part of travelling – suck it up or move on.
Like someone else said – if you can’t move on, try volunteering. Give back to the locals that up putting up with you.
Spare a thought for the folks who are living in these areas…..they don’t have the option of moving on!
Our autumn weather in Tasmania has been fabulous . A bit of a deluge a week or so ago, which was much needed, but then it was 19 degrees today which is virtually unheard of for May.