This is going to be a travel blog for the next three weeks, as we are heading up north to Monkey Mia, Ningaloo, Exmouth and Karajini for a winter holiday. Well it’s winter here in Perth, where it’s cool during the day, cold at night, and plenty of rain ( over East it’s ice and snow !) but heading up north we will get to weather that is more like spring. I reckon 25C during the day, cool at night and cold at Karajini as it’s inland.

I’ll update how I’m going with the walking and swimming, I won’t be doing as much structured exercise as usual but there will be a lot of activity. My physio, who I saw today, is very happy with my progress. The main improvement he’s seeing is in strength and balance – the increases are small, but steady and sustained. Karajini will involve lots of walking and scrambling, also swimming in the gorges, and the Ningaloo area is all about swimming and snorkelling, so he is not concerned that the exercise will be a lot less structured. The holiday will be very active, other than the enormous distances we have to drive.

And the new form of transport … we have a camper trailer !

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She hasn’t got a name yet, although given her registration is something wth TUB in it, Fatty seems to be the current option. Imagine a trailer with a really good mattress on top of the trailer, and a tent on top of the mattress. The tent sets up over the bed and into an awning, like the third photograph. The kitchen pulls out from the back of the trailer, and includes a fridge with freezer compartment.

For those interested in the nerdy details, a twin battery system is charged from the car, and with a solar panel to trickle charge when we’re not moving. I think there is 200 litres of water storage, and a diesel hot water heater. We have a shower attachment, so although they will be short, we can have hot showers. The campsite at Ningaloo is totally self contained, with no power, which will be a good test of the camper’s capabilities. She is fully 4WD capable, so our holiday plans for the next few years are all very much off-grid.

Back to the MS and recovery, today’s physio visit was a very good reminder that the recovery is long, slow and steady. Basically my brain is having to rewire itself around the scarred myelin sheath ( there are potential treatments to remediate the myelin sheath scarring, but they are still at the stage of experimenting on mice with the mousy version of MS at the moment ), and the muscles which have weakened are taking time to rebuild. My brain is also having to re-learn how to communicate with the muscles as well. Hence slow and steady is just fine.

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