As I was saying..

I was a bit fried after that huge drive and complained to Mum (after she made me drive her around town looking for a gift for Mumps) "are you all going to have to actually witness my physical and mental breakdown before one of you takes Anakin and lets me have a bloody sleep??!!" Well they took him for about 20 minutes while I tried to reorder the neurons! Fark! And I didn't take it too well when my Auntie gatecrashed into my motel room and set up a DVD player for all the older kids to watch zombie movies. I was like "fine I'll just grab all my stuff and move into your room shall I? Fancy sharing it with a 2 year old and a strung out crazy-woman? (I'm sure about as much as I wanted to share mine with a bunch of morose pre-teens) Shove over! He we come!!"
Anyway it was all fun and games, a whirlwind of BBQ's, morning teas, pool parties, tennis, dining out..
Then come Monday afternoon I packed up the kids and headed on down to Gympie, which once upon a time had a reputation as "Hell Town", a name which I refuse to let die, I'm actually single handedly responsible for perpetuating the myth. All the way me and the kids were singing the ACDC song "I'm on the (sing it with me) High Way to Hell!! .....town". Actually it's a really beautiful place where I got to hang out with my old uni mate Jenny and meet her girlfriend (as opposed to boyfriend in this context), who was a real honey too. We all have two boys each! So it was a barrel of fun.
Thursday the T @B got delivered by my best buddy Bill!
And get this bit, it freaked me right out... after all the papers where signed and the transactions complete and Bill went on his (not so) merry way (I would cry too selling such a cool van), this huge thunder and lightening storm rolled in and everyone was talking hail (oh.my.God.) The roller doors to Jenny's shed were too small to be able to get the van under cover and I just stood at the kitchen window with this totally grim look on my face for about an hour (I should have got a photo of it), while the lightening and wind and rain and occasional "tink" "tink" of hail beat down and whipped around my lonely little van, sitting in an increasingly large puddle... oh God... Thankfully it rolled away just as fast and my little Tabernacle was left undamaged... geez, what a freakout..
Friday was Mammoth!! I drove another 1 n a half hours further south and spent the day at the Australian Zoo with the kids visiting koalas and tortoises and wombats and camels and elephants and tigers and cheetahs and pigs and sheep and goats and komoda dragons and crocs and alligators and .. well we bloody saw everything that was there....

Greg had caught a plane to Gympie and a bus to Beerwah and met us out the front at closing time.
Then we took our time driving back to Gympie where we took our time hooking up the van and packing up the car and then we began our very looong journey home.
Greg musta missed me a lot while I was away - after the kids went to bed the first night we were on the road he told me he wanted to marry me! It was a really nice moment actually. We were looking at each other adoringly through the darkness and giving each other big cuddles coz it was just so nice to see each other after a week apart and I said "you CAN marry me." Thinking we were just talking sweetly .. and he's gone "Really! I want you to be my wife! I've got you a ring, it's right here!" I'm just like "are you for real!!!! Oh my God! I wanna see it!!! Where is it??!!" Probably be an eternity before we can actually afford a wedding, but never mind first things first - a rollicking big old engagement part, with lots of food and drink and a bonfire!! Woo-hoo!! You can all come too!!


(I'll come back later and add some pix, it's getting late and it's my last day of school tomorrow