Australia Day

OK, I have been offline again for a little bit. Same old story - when I have the time it's because there is nothing particularly exciting going on, so you get posts about me cleaning my junk room. When something interesting is actually happening, I am too busy to blog!

Last Friday night, DH, Little Bear & I went to DH's brothers place for dinner. Little Bear had cousin C all to herself because Cheetah & Cousin T were still in Newcastle visiting Nanna.

It was a beautiful dinner (of course. Aunty M is a good great fantastic cook) and while we were there, they invited us to drive to Cairns with them on the Sunday to visit Sugarworld (waterpark) and stay overnight, returning home on the Monday (Australia Day).

The reason for this trip at such short notice, was that Aunty M left her phone at a place in Cairns after a diving trip. She contacted them & they told her to come & pick it up. She asked them to post it as it was a 4 hour+ drive, they said no - you come pick it up. Aunty M couldn't remember the name of this place, only how to get there, so she couldn't ask someone in Cairns to pick it up for her. Anyway, they decided to go up for the long weekend, spend a day at the waterpark & come back the next day & invited us along for the ride.

Sounded like fun & as we thought it would be nice to do something special with Cheetah before he returned to school (as he had been away from us for 10 days), we agreed to go with them.

It was hectic getting everything ready and we were up until 12:30am the morning before we left. As Sugarworld opens at 10:00am, my Brother In Law wanted to leave here at 6am so we would get there not long after it opened. That meant just 5 hours sleep the night before. We were up so late because I wasn't sure when we would get back on Monday & school resumed on the Tuesday so I had to make sure that we were all ready for the week ahead as well as the trip.

After all that, we got to Sugarworld at 10:30ish and stayed until 2:30ish. It was a fantastic day. We barely saw the kids & Little Bear was happy to ride 3 out of the 4 waterslides. She probably would have ridden on the 4th one too, but we wouldn't take her as it was too hard keeping your own balance on that one, let alone trying to hold onto a kid at the same time. By 2:30 DH said she would have gone to sleep on his shoulder if only the slides were longer.



Just before home time, we stopped for an icecream. Aunty M bought Little Bear a chocolate paddle pop. I tried to get the full mess in the photo, but unfortunately it didn't really show up much. I have therefore cropped the photo, however you can see that besides her face & hands, Little Bear's leg & swimmers are covered in chocolate icecream. As well as this, Aunty M had one whole side of her leg covered, there was some on the seat & a huge puddle of melted icecream underneath them.

It was a fantastically Aussie way to celebrate Australia Day, even if it was a day early because we were going to be travelling home the next day.

(Although an absolutely fantastic time was had by all, it was a waterpark after all & this is why there is a lack of photo's illustrating this post. Camera's & water don't mix. Aunty M did get a couple more, including one of Little Bear & Daddy coming out the bottom of one of the water slides. I will see if I can get a copy to post).

That night we stayed at the Sebel which used to be the Cairns International. The room was a $400 p/n room on the top floor next to the presidential suite which we got for $109 p/n through Wotif & didn't even have to pay extra for the 2 kids.

The view was beautiful, overlooking the casino, however it was a bit too scary for me being up so high & it looked like Little Bear might actually fit through the railing, so we kept the door closed.

Cheetah was absolutely psychotic that night. You would have thought he would be spent, but apparently Sugarworld is so named because of the effect it has on young children. He had eaten well that day, so diet wasn't to blame. He was just absolutely off the rails & got in so much trouble over & over & over again (& still went back for more). Thankfully he got it out of his system that night & the next day he was well behaved on the trip home.

Happy Australia Day