Family Holiday

As some of you know, my family and I went on our first holiday together in ten years earlier this month. Considering my oldest is nine, you're probably thinking that I suck at maths, but au contraire! The last actual holiday (and by that I mean one that involved time off work and feeding arrangements for the pets as opposed to just taking off for a weekend, which we do do relatively often) was when The Starchild and I were on our honeymoon in February/March 1999!

I have just this afternoon added some of the more than 1300 (I kid you not) pictures over the ten days we were away to Facebook so my Facebook friends will no doubt be relishing the chance to sit through this duplication of images with their minds only wandering slightly to reminisce over times when slide nights were still a favoured social event - but for the rest of you, I though I'd share a few images of this most wonderful time I spent with my husband and three children.

We left at 4am - yes, 4am, people. I'd had about an hour and a half sleep after two bottles of wine and I was finally packed and ready to go. There'd been flooding up north the week before so we had a detour that added about an hour and a half to the trip, but in our lovely new car, Thea, more time on the road was actually a good thing. We got to the place we were staying in Queensland in the late afternoon and settled in nicely.

Day Two saw us at White Water World.

Here's Kman under the spill from the giant water bucket in the Nickelodeon area:


Here's The Starchild and the impossible princess after just going down a water slide:

Here's the smiley monster playing with a water thing (funnily enough) where there were several levels of water spouts that you could line up and have flowing into one another:


Day Three was Sea World. This was one of my favourites but most of the pics were of the things to see there. Here's a photo of me and the kids at the entrance:


Day Four was Warner Bros Movie World (a.k.a. Hollywood on the Gold Coast - ha! as if, in Australia). This was my other favourite. Here's The Starchild and the kids at the entrance:


It was such a great time of year to go. Despite the flooding just south during the previous week, we had blue skies and NO QUEUES everywhere we went.






Day Five was Dream World. Yes, that's four theme parks in four days - and there were still others we didn't get to go to. It's not surprising that The Starchild, with his Entreprenerial yet simultaneously childlike spirit wants to move up there. I like this next picure because I think it was the only picture on our whole holiday where we are all in it.

You can probably tell from my pics that I am not much of a ride fan but we did go on a lot of them - just not the extreme ones. I do have lots of photos of the kids and us on rides but I am trying to post mostly group shots here. This next one was later in the day but I was happy because the smiley monster was typically getting pretty bored with photos by this time but he decided to go in this one:


This next picture was at The Haunted House in Surfers Paradise. The Kman is such a good actor and I would love to go back to this place when he is a little older as they have a tour/show thing that I think we would both quite enjoy. They had a shop front where they sold all horror type things and I could have very easily have been persuaded to buy a disembodied motion-sensor hand but was surprisingly not pleeded with to do so.

We spent a few hours at a place called Crystal Castle on the way back down south and it was amazing. Here are a few pics but I have set my facebook page so anyone can see the rest of them. Let me know if you have any problems viewing the rest of the pics here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=114487&id=688091078




Australia is pretty big on big things and one of the big things that we have on offer is the big Banana in Coffs Harbour. We stayed two nights in Coffs after leaving Queensland.

And last but certainly not least, we spent the last three days of our holidays at a gorgeous place called Talawahl Eco Lodge at the Clarendon Forest Retreat. I won't go into all of the details of this most beautiful of places as I am totally smitten with the place and fear that I will fall to the floor weeping least I think on it any longer. You can't see the heated flooring and mood lighting in the pool from this angle but here is a picture of the outside of the place that we spent the last three glorious nights of our first family holiday in ten years:


Thanks for reliving these memories with me through these pictures!