Love and let go...

Cairns, Australia really is a lovely place. The city is fairly large yet maintains a rather low-key charm. The buildings remain to code, all low-rise, with so many incredible places to dine, drink, party, shop, anything. It’s funny because nearly every place along the coast has a beach close to the main street or often the beach is the main street. Cairns however, has a neatly landscaped harbour with a large artificial lagoon swimming area. The lagoon extends into a park with an extensive promenade attracting a variety of enthusiasts. We actually arrived in town the same day as a U.S. Naval War Ship, the largest ever to dock in the scenic Cairns Harbour. Since our arrival US Sailors have flooded the recreational area along the esplanade, usually jogging or cruising the streets in uniform attracting a fair bit of attention. We spent a few days in Cairns knowing that soon enough we would have to put our van up for sale. Winter, particularly July and August, are the high season months for Cairns and we immediately noticed that the place was full of tourists and backpackers. The notice boards around town were full of ads selling vehicles of all kinds. We didn’t want to leave it too late so we figured we would give ourselves about 2 weeks to turn her over. For the next couple weeks Cairns would act as a home base and we had a few small trips planned from here. We didn’t want to travel too far away incase we had to show off Fran. The first weekend in July we had plans to attend the Kuranda Roots Festival about 30 minutes out of town. Seeing as we were scheduled to fly in exactly 2 weeks, we thought we would post our ad before leaving for the festival just to see how much initial interest she would fetch. We picked up a pay-as-you-go cell phone to field interested buyers’ calls and put together an impressive flyer. Friday morning before leaving for Kuranda, we walked around the main streets of Cairns locating 16 different bulletin boards where we placed our ad…here’s hoping, fingers crossed…