Car trouble and settling in Down Under

2 November 2006

England's Jenny Gunn is writing a diary for ecb.co.uk during her stint playing cricket Down Under this winter. Follow her exclusively here on ecb.co.uk

It’s nearly three weeks since we arrived in Australia, and I was thinking that the first week or two would be quite chilled and relaxed so we could slowly adjust to everything, but how wrong could we have been.

We arrived on October 12 quite early in the morning and had to wait to be picked up to be taken to our house where we are staying in Cherrybrook which is about an hour from the airport.

We arrived at our house and it was amazing. It has the biggest TV we have ever seen and also has a pool and spa area which was quite nice to sit around in the first few days when it was around 36 degrees C.

As we are living around 30-40 minutes away from the city we required a car. A friend of the person we are living with offered us her old car, so we jumped at the chance.

All seemed well until we went on a drive to find another car we were allowed to use when the car wasn’t moving too well. When we got out we discovered that we had a flat tyre.

Lucky Cheesy (Rosalie Birch) knew exactly what to do and changed it on the roadside. But this was nothing compared to what happened next.

Cheesy and I had just dropped Beth (Morgan) off in the city before returning home when the engine over-heated and the car just cut out. Somehow we managed to pull into a garage but this time Cheesy wasn’t too sure what the problem was.

Rosalie and car see who can get over-heated first!

It’s quite funny though how everything has happened when I’ve been driving the car. I have now been banned from driving and have to sit in the back everywhere we go.

Cricket is going well over here. We all play for different clubs. Cheesy plays for Wallsend, Beth plays for St George Sutherland and I play for UTS Balmain.

We all started off well with wins and each of us picking up a couple of wickets. The second game saw my team play Cheesy’s.

My team batted first and scored 231 and Cheesy’s team just fell short by 20 runs. It was a big win for us as Wallsend are one of the strongest teams in our league.

At the minute we are writing from the Allan Boarder Field in Brisbane where we are watching Australia play New Zealand. We have been travelling around a bit and stayed in Noosa for a couple of days, which has to be one of the nicest places in the world!

It’s been that hot that I think my sock marks have blended in with the rest of my tan. As I got burnt yesterday I’m trying to keep out of the sun as I have a big game tomorrow against Beth and want to keep our winning streak going.

I’ll fill you in on that result in next week’s instalment!