Friday 3rd Dec

After a rousing spot of squash and an uninspiring 6 hours’ sleep, we were up and frantically getting ready, attempting to present ourselves at Didee and Pop's house at 9am.  Rory didn't feel the urgency, rolling on her back on the floor, legs up in the air, expecting some sort of praise for achieving this incredible feat of acrobatics. 

 

"Rory, socks and shoes on!"

 

After discussing our pending late arrival in the car, Rory had many questions in the singular form of "why?".  At some point our explanations distilled to explaining how the aeroplane had a strict time it would take off (11:30am in this case), and if we didn't get there in time it would go without us and we would miss the holiday.  This captured her attention, and every 4 minutes thereafter she checked if the plane had left.

We made good time and arrived at Didee and Pop’s right on 9am.  Pip (the butcher of Ryde) put aside her hippocratic oath for a few minutes to administer a covid test for Liza and I and then promptly left with Didee, Pip, George, and lil baby Anna for Wollstonecraft station.  Pop came back to pick up Liza, Rory, and I, thereby allowing us to only leave 1 car at the station.  Liza and Rory hopped out and proceeded to meet up with the others as Pop and I found a parking spot and began the walk ourselves.  Half way there Pop realised he had left his backpack at home, so handed some luggage to me, and raced back to pick it up.  I met up with the gang and it didn’t take too long for us to realise that the next train – arriving in 3 minutes – was the last viable train to get to the airport on time.  We made the snap decision to let Didee and Pip catch the train with the 3 kids, while Liza and I waited for Pop.  We would then catch an Uber and take all the luggage with us.  This would allow us to avoid having to try and find some taxi(s) that had child seats to take Rory, George, and lbA.

Pop must have driven like a madman and sprinted back to the station, because only just as the train was pulling away from the station did he arrive with his backpack.  It turned out that it was a good thing he went back – we had left their house door and front gate wide open!

I called an Uber, and we jammed the luggage in and were on our way to the airport.  The driver was very slow, but the aircon was pumping and we arrived before anyone else, so in retrospect had probably the easiest trip in.  Tom was the next to arrive from the train, having taken Clinky to a kennel separately.  The ladies and children arrived last, I hear George had mistimed his wees and needed to go badly during the train ride.  I also hear team ladies and children had seriously considered getting him to do a wee out of the carriage doors when the train had stopped at a station, like 2am on a Saturday night after a heavy sesh at the Ivy.  He managed to hold until their airport stop, though.

The next drama involved luggage, with the check-in kiosk not recognising Liza’s request to check-in 2 pieces of luggage.  After speaking to two different people, we managed to get one of the suitcases marked as “additional”, with the risk that it may take a day or two to arrive.  With that sorted we were through customs, and a short wait away from boarding.

Rory sat next to me on a window seat, but she’s so short that all she could really see was the sky through the window.  She still had a great time, loving it when we were flying through the clouds.  After the fasten seatbelts sign went off, we had some nibbles, and George found his way over to us and sat next to Rory while they mucked around and watched Gabby’s Dollhouse on my old phone.

The flight was about 2 hours all up, and we arrived without incident.  Once at our accommodation (The Beachcomber), we decided to walk down to the shops to pick up some bits and pieces, and also to pick up our hire bikes.  We made it to the shops first, where Didee and Pop spent something like $80 on groceries that would have cost probably less than $40 at home.  It was at this point Pip and George disappeared.

The rest of us went on to the bike shop and waited about 20 minutes to get served – the grizzled bike guy was busy fixing some young grommet’s bike and wouldn’t even speak to us until he was ready.  Eventually he was and started fitting us out, but Pip and George were still nowhere to be seen.  For the kids we had 2 cabooses that we towed behind the bikes.  At this point we had sent out multiple search parties for Pip and George, but they all returned empty handed, so we left Pip’s bike at the shop and started riding back to The Beachcomber.  It was on the road back that we finally bumped into Pip, with a sleeping George in piggy-back position (!!).  We popped him in my caboose and Pop went back to the bike shop to get her bike.

Back at The Beachcomber we settled in for some drinks and biccies and to discuss the coming days’ activities.  We had a delish dinner of Spag-bol (thanks Lizl!), and at some point someone mentioned how I wrote journals of holidays, and so here I am.  Still have to work out where I’m going to upload this…