Happy New Year!

Friday 1 January, 2010
Day 5

We considered going into Coffs Harbour for the fireworks on the jetty, but decided we would just have a quiet New Years Eve celebration here. We bought some sparklers for the kids, had a bonfire, watched the 9:00 Sydney fireworks show on TV, had some nibblies, and just hung out. It was really nice. Maya took a nap earlier in the day which was great because she then had plenty of steam.







I fell asleep with her around 10ish and missed the real party - the guys brought out the barbeque and some potatos for barbequed chips, yummmm.

But when Eli and Maya woke up at 6:30, I was glad I had had plenty of sleep. Knowing that everyone else had had a late night, I wanted to get Eli away as he tends to be loud in the morning. I put him on my back in the Ergo, and the three of us set off on a walk down the long gravel road. We were looking for wildlife but didn't spot much besides birds. There were a few big butterflies and a little mouse, and deafening cicadas in the background. Maya took her new mermaid, and we walked to where we could get to the river so "Shelly" (I think her name is currently "Pretty", but it was Shelly at the time) could spot some of her water friends. She didn't, but that was okay. We measured our walk later when I went into town with Michael (the internet cafe is still closed!! So we're still unable to sort out our wireless internet with 3!!) and had done 3 1/2 km. It's interesting how far kids will walk when it's for fun and not to reach a destination.

The sky cleared, the day was sunny, and in the afternoon we headed to the beach at Nambucca Heads. I am always surprised by just how much I love the ocean. I mean, I always know that I love going to the beach, but when I pull around that last bend and the ocean opens up wide in front of me, I always get an unexpected, exhilirated thrill. I had a hormonal headache all morning, so I was looking forward to submerging myself in the salt water. Of course, once we walked down onto the beach, the wind was blowing and the clouds had covered up the sun, but it's January so the ocean isn't freezing cold, and in we went. I had a lone dip before taking Eli with me, and then walked out deep with him until the waves were at our shoulders. I held him close in the water for a long time (until his shivers cued me to get him out) and we gently swayed with the waves. He was weightless and so easy to carry, and it was the longest milk-free cuddle we've had in a long time. I loved it.

Nate and Maya love the beach too. Maya isn't fussed about the water, but she'll play in the sand for hours. Growing up in Oregon, I know how it feels to just like to be near the ocean and not necessarily in it. Nate loves it all though, and spent some time swimming with Nick while I was back onshore with Eli.

It was sooo handy having the motorhome. The kids rinsed off in our own shower, dried off and got dressed inside, and we hadn't had to pack a bunch of stuff up to take with us in the car - it was already all there! I am so happy with the choice we made.

On the way back to the farm, Nate asked if we could leave tomorrow. I said we'd talk about it with Michael and Kathryn, who were sweetly not keen to have us leave. It's nice to feel wanted. Maya announced at dinner, out of the blue, "We're leaving tomorrow. Really we are." We talked to them though, and they are happy to stay one more day so that Nick has time to rearrange the motorhome a bit to make the beach stuff more accessible and put away the sleeping bags which we haven't needed yet (too warm, just sheets are fine). And so that Kathryn and I can go into Bellingen for a few hours which is just about 14 kilometres away.

Michael said to me, when I mentioned respecting the kids' wishes and leaving, with not a little sarcasm, "Gee, I wish I had a mum like you when I was a kid. My mum would just tell me to do what I was told." But shouldn't that be our goal as parents? To parent as we wish we had been, not just repeating the same patterns because that's what we know? To put a bit more thought into the thing? That's part of what this whole trip is about for me - for all of us to be equal partners in our lives. I don't want my kids growing up having been victims of a dictatorship. And that's my soapbox rant for the day.

Time is on our side

Thursday 31 December, 2009
Day4

I have hardly left the farm since we've been here. I did pop out this morning to meet my friend Marnie in town as she and the girls were passing through on their way back to Sydney. It was uncanny timing - she was 3 minutes from Urunga when we finally got in touch (hard with no mobile reception or internet), so she stopped at the tourist centre and Michael's cousin drove me in to meet her to pick up the mermaid she made for Maya - Nate had it commissioned for Christmas. Thanks Marnie!

When we got back to the farm, someone was going into Coffs Harbour and had waited in case I wanted to go with her, and the men were going fishing. I didn't feel like fussing with carseats, and really I found myself completely unanxious to go anywhere. I have no time constraints, no deadlines, nothing else I "should" be doing. I'm sitting on the veranda, watching the cows grazing near the pumpkin patch, while Eli snoozes in the motorhome and the kids play with their friends. If this "holiday" had a finish date, I know I'd be feeling a lot more anxious to DO MORE, SEE MORE, EXPERIENCE MORE. As it is, we have all the time in the world! I do hope to get down the road to Bellingen soon though. I hear the markets are great.

A few of us women went for a 3 km walk this morning which was really nice - fresh air, beautiful country views along the river. I hope to do a bit more of that.

At the farm

Wednesday 30 December, 2009
Day 3

We spoke to Michael as we were getting close to the farm and he told us that he was making curry for dinner. Nick and I were both looking forward to getting off of the road and relaxing with curries and beers, and hoping that the kids wouldn't be too high maintenance for any relaxation to actually happen.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that besides our friends and us, Michael's cousin's family is also staying here at the farm, and that family includes two kids - D is 5 and C just turned 8. The kids all hit it off right away.

It has been raining since we left Sydney, with only a few short breaks here and there. This is great news for the farms as the rain hasn't been too heavy to be absorbed by the land. There have been flood warnings, but no major floods. And the rain is still falling.

So what do you do at a farm in the rain? It's a fairly warm rain, so Michael's uncle Morris and one of the cousins set up a long sheet of plastic, the kids and dads soaped themselves up with dishwashing liquid, and down the water slide they went!

Wishing we had opted for the camera with a better zoom...



Later in the afternoon, a couple more cousins and their families came over for a barbeque, and by then the rain was really coming down. They had another go on the water slide. I'm not sure who had more fun, the kids or the men. I didn't go down although I was tossing up about it, but this morning everyone is covered with bruises and scratches, and I don't feel like I missed out.

We are underway!

Odometer reading: 203045
Monday 28 December, 2009
Day 1

After a stressful day yesterday of cleaning the house we have been staying at, doing lots of laundry, and packing everything up, we are now on the road.

Well okay, it wasn't that stressful. Not so stressful that we couldn't take a break to see Sherlock Holmes. I love me some Robert Downey Jr. But that last foray ended up being a bit less stress-relieving than we intended because of the thousands of people out doing their post Christmas bargain shopping. Parking was a nightmare, there were angry parents and crying children everywhere, and we ended up having to see a later show because the lines were so long And then Nick fell asleep during the movie. But I liked it, and I felt relaxed afterwards.

While we were at the movie, the kids had a few fun hours with their grandmother, auntie, uncle and niece. They played their cousin's new Wii and had a blast, and we had a lovely send-off with all of the family waving from the veranda while we drove the motorhome away for the last time. Eli was still waving and calling, "Byeeeee!" 10 minutes later.

This morning we finished everything up, carted all of the last things out to our "home on wheels" as the kids like to refer to it, and set off.

As I type, we are on Pennant Hills Rd heading towards the F3 which will take us north. We're skipping all of the sights between here and Urunga since we are heading straight to the farm. We intend to hit them up at the other end of our trip. We've never been to the Central Coast or spent any time just north of Sydney, so we're keen to do that as well. But today we're going straight to the farm.

Christmas

Here is a lovely Christmas wish from an online friend named Ariad:

This Christmas I wish for you that all the wrapping paper you receive is old newspaper or recycled kids art-works and that it ends up mulching your gardens.
I hope everyone appreciates the effort you've put into your hand-made gifts.
Hoping your children don't receive any presents made with poisonous plastics or lead paint.
May your in-laws NOT feed the kids too many artificial food additives.
I wish for you that you don't receive too much crap that you will have to keep because you'd feel too guilty to give it straight to good-will.
I hope that none of your friends or relatives argue or get too drunk and obnoxious.
I hope you get as much from giving as receiving.

BUT most of all have FUN and remember to LOVE
It's only one day after all. See you the other side of Christmas.

As for us, we have had a wonderful morning. Since we are soon departing with limited space, our families didn't want to buy us things we didn't need and instead gave us money for us to buy presents on their behalf. And we did! Woo hoo! Sleeping bags, new stainless steel water bottles, a few books and arty things, a few items of clothing, some edible things, etc. It was a lot of organisation, but definitely worth it since we'll have everything we need and nothing we don't want.

We're off to Nick's mum's house in a couple of hours for the Christmas feast and more presents.

We have been watching a few of the old Christmas classics like the 1969 Frosty the Snowman and the 1964 Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The latter is laughably sexist and has been fodder for conversation on how attitudes change over time. Seems like we're heading for equality. I hope so.

Wife Swap

The friends we are staying with have Foxtel (cable TV for all of you non-Aussies), and the other night after the kids were asleep, we flipped through the stations until we came across this episode of the UK Wife Swap. Jackpot.

This episode featured two English families that living in Spain. One family (we'll call them The Posh Family) are financially loaded. Four kids, three paid staff, a dad who works 12 hour days at his jet-ski business. The oldest girl, 15, has her own credit card with a 300 POUND a WEEK shopping allowance. The youngest, a 3 year old boy, has a full time nanny and speaks as much Spanish as English because of the time he spends with her.

The other family (we'll call them the Hippy Family) lives on a houseboat on the river and has a small plot of land on the shore. Their entire weekly budget, for a five person family, is something like 6 Euros. They grow their own veggies, raise their own animals for meat, and homeschool. They don't use any chemicals in the house and aim to be self-sustainable.

I watched this episode with mainstream friends who both happen to be school teachers, so there was some conversation to be had. The slaughtering of a chicken and the saving of urine as fertiliser would have been a bit confronting to watch for a lot of people. It seems a lot more normal in our society to just go to the shops for synthetic fertiliser and clean-looking chicken flesh packed in sterile plastic, easy to separate from its history. The Posh mom thought it was all a waste of time. Why spend all of that time doing it yourself when you could go to work for the money to pay someone else to do it for you?

But the Hippies chose a life together over the modern commercial life, plain and simple. The Posh mom said that her marriage and family are so strong precisely because they hardly see eachother. Yikes.

The Posh mom sent the Hippy dad out to work while she took the kids shopping for food they would have never bought otherwise - Fanta, ChocoSomething breakfast cereal, harsh chemical cleaning products. The dad was portrayed as lazy since he wasn't working outside of the home and "earning a living", and man that shits me. He spends half of the day working around the house planting and harvesting food for his kids - isn't that the same thing? Isn't that providing?? - and the other half is quality time together. I daresay the Posh children would trade some of their possessions for more quality time with their dad. They said it themselves.

The Hippies were so inspirational. They live within their means, spending quality time with eachother rather than farming out their kids. Yeah, I prefer my bathroom to be a bit cleaner than theirs, but hey. A little baking soda, vinegar and elbow grease, and you're golden.

Maybe in a few years we'll be in Spain. I love that it is a very distinct possibility.

Car accident

No, it wasn't us!

We were out and about in the motorhome today, on our way to get a storage box installed on the back. We were waiting at a light, and in the intersection in front of us, there was a car accident. It was so loud and scary. Even though we were right there in the front row, it happened so fast that it was hard to make out what exactly had happened. It was clear that one of the cars had been moving very fast and that the other had turned in front of it.

The fast car skidded waaaaay over to our left, into the grass, and stopped just short of a fence. The driver and passenger, both 20-something females, both got out right away, bent double, looking injured and shocked. The passenger lay down on the footpath. Both airbags had deployed and they had clearly felt the impact.

The turning car sat in the intersection, and we sat and looked at it for a few seconds before it occurred to us that somebody could be hurt in there. I got out and ran over, and with a sick feeling I noticed the two carseats in the back. I opened the back door and the two little girls, one about 18 months old and one about 3, were both crying, but they weren't hurt. The mom was confused. Nick and I took the little girls out of the car since it was still in the middle of the intersection of a very busy road. The engine was smoking. There was oil and car parts everywhere.

By the time we got the girls to the grassy area, loads of other people had stopped. People really are amazing. Someone was directing traffic (which was already completely backed up). There were people with the fast car's occupants, getting them water and helping the passenger breathe through what she thought must be broken ribs. Ambulances were called. Luckily our motorhome came equipped with a fire hydrant because the turning car's engine burst into flames before the fire department arrived - someone was spraying them while a bunch of us were pulling the carseats and other possessions out of the smokey car in case it exploded, Hollywood-style (it didn't).

We stayed until the police arrived, not wanting to leave the scene of an accident even though we had no useful information to share. We talked about seatbelts and how if the two in the fast car hadn't been wearing theirs, they would have been thrown out of the car.

After everyone was packed away into ambulances (the mom had called someone to meet her and the little girls), we resumed our errand. The officer directing traffic wouldn't let us turn left (which I thought was a bit rude considering we could have, there was room, and we had just spent an hour there helping out, well before he showed up) so we had to turn the wrong direction. We saw that the traffic was backed up and we would have had to turn around and sit in it to get where we had wanted to go. Nick hates traffic, so there was no chance we were going to sit in it. I myself am not particularly fond of sitting in traffic on 40 degree days (that's C not F), so was happy to jump ship. We drove past miles and miles of backup.

Oh I forgot to mention that 100 meters down the road of the scene of the accident, another completely unrelated car flipped over the median. Rubbernecker? Didn't help the traffic situation. That guy was fine.

We're hoping to get that storage box tomorrow.