Well laid plans?

Australian Swagman's Hat

Well, that blew that idea out of the water! Here was me thinking that the Chambers, the couple I have been following on their trip around Australia, were ticking off the boxes on a travel plan that had been all written out in advance: see these sights on this day, meet up with long lost family at this place, move on to the next leg of the journey on this date. Instead, in addition to being kicked out of their Adelaide hotel because of the test match, they totally rewrote the end of the trip so that they could return home another way, necessitating a longer stay in Australia. As May Chambers wrote: "I have been waiting until I could (Mar. 5) release the news that we have at last been able to book package home via Vancouver, Frisco, Los Angeles and Panama etc. We only heard of this one voyage on the "Orsova". It means staying on this side another month so that we will not arrive in Vancouver until June 21st."

Because their new route back touched on several US ports, they now needed to apply for visas and, because of US rules stating that passports had to have at least six months left on them before they expired, May had to renew her passport and sent away to Canberra to do so. Needless to say, she wasn't happy with her hasty passport photos!

This is Harold's new itinerary:

As for the arrangements to meet up with long lost family, that was a surprise too. It seemed very much a play it by ear thing. Harold must have lost touch with the cousin who he had named as next of kin on his attestation papers at the beginning of WWI, hardly surprising as it was 40 years later. The way they got back in touch was the surprising part. As May wrote: "Some exciting news - while we were at Katoomba Dad phoned the Police to find they had located his cousin Margaret who lived about thirty miles out of New Castle at a place called Soldiers Point. He was able to talk with her on the phone and has arranged to go up there for a week from next Wed." Finally, the letters are getting to the part which may lend more clues to the sketchy family trees that first started my quest.


Sources:

Chambers, M.C. Letter to Mr. and Mrs. C.E.B. Cavanagh written March 4/55 from Sydney, c/o Bank of New South Wales

Chambers, M.C. Letter to Mrs. C.E.B. Cavanagh written March 31/55 from Coogee

Images:

Harold Chambers' itinerary from Chambers, M.C. Letter to Mrs. C.E.B. Cavanagh written March 19/55 from Kartoomba, Blue Mountains

 

Swagman hat by Clément Bucco-Lechat - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22857758