Last few days in Australia

On the 25th we moved from our lovely north curl curl apartment. We were gutted because we'd miss it so much, but also, we are coming to an end. Nikki, the owner bought Ellie a kangaroo back pack, it was so thoughtful! We headed to Al and Clem's where we were spending our last two nights. Sadly, Al had to go to New Zealand for work so we weren't to see him again this trip. Luckily for us Clemmie is an excellent hostess and had left bollognaise sauce in the fridge and baked muffins. Plus bought us all kinds of Aussie chocolates an crisps. That night we put the kids to bed nice and early and had some nice food and a couple of bottles of wine, lovely!

Wednesday 26th was our last full day in Australia and it rained! Clemmie set me up for the day with one of her green smoothies (actually very nice) We headed into town on the bus with a lady in the seat next to me poking me, eyes bulging screaming "they all think I'm mad but I ain't! I've seen a physiologist and he says I'm mad!" To which I replied "you aren't mad! What does he know?!!" And we got off promptly at the next stop, so did she! Shit! No worries though, she wobbled off to talk to other people! We went to the sealife centre which was great, Joey loved the fish in the large tanks that you could push him right up to and he could see in. Ellie got to see sting rays after her recent Steve Irwin fascination and we had a lovely walk around I took loads of pictures at what I thought was the best bit walking through the glass tunnels with the rays floating over and smaller sharks and my phone battery ran out and then they had an even better set of tunnels with bigger sharks, gutted! We also headed to the park we took Ellie to in Darling harbour for her birthday and she was soooo excited. We didn't get back until quite late which unfortunately meant we missed the kids next door as they'd gone to after school clubs and it was raining etc so Ellie never got to say goodbye to her friends, pretty sad really. We did catch the girls and Tommy quickly on Tuesday night when we got there and they just smothered Ellie and Joey in cuddles and all retreated to Ellie's room to jump on the bed so that was better than nothing. Wednesday night Jim went out in the pouring rain and grabbed us all some pizza which we had, followed by caramel koalas, Tim Tams and swilled down with a nice Aussie Shiraz, really lovely. But we were knackered so I think we were in bed for ten ish.

Thursday 27th came along... Oh dear... The day we definitely start the journey home... It poured down in the morning, probably helped us get ourselves together. We said our goodbyes to Clemmie and she headed off to work, we packed up, ate some of our muffins and called a cab and couldn't get through.... Oh crap.... Luckily we decided to order it a little in advance so due to the rain it was constantly engaged, mildly panicked I persisted and after half an hour got through and we left within ten minutes. Ellie gave the pugaliers some cuddles and we made our way to Sydney Airport. Unfortunately we were hoping to catch Alex one last time as he flew in from New Zealand but our taxis probably passed each other. All we had left was nine hours on a plane with a pretty strong 16 month old who has learned to walk in Australia and sure as hell has no plans to sit down on the way to Singapore! The girl gave us two seats on one row and one on the row in front. I was livid at first, but got over it pretty quickly. We ended up, even though we were very prompt, rushing to the gate, Mcdonalds in hand (classy!) and were on board our very low budget plane that didn't even have TVs on board! Once were were seated we realised she'd left the seat next to our two free and put a seat in front so essentially the very kind lady who I may or may not have said nasty things about had given us four seats. (Guess who sat on the single seat, it wasn't me, Ellie or Joey...!) the flight wasn't too bad, we rented two iPads and Ellie watched a couple of movies, she's really very good. Joey was more challenging but once he'd finally screamed himself to sleep he slept on me for an hour and a half so I at least got to watch a film. I was so busy the flight went relatively quickly and because I wasn't sat still I didn't ache to badly or feel too tired. We managed to look over some of Australia's amazing landscape, I want to go in land next time we visit, it's stunning. So, at 19:30 local time (22:30 our time) we landed in Changi Airport in Singapore. Obviously with only two of our three bags, that's what happens to us now (grrrrrrr) hopefully that will arrive tomorrow and we can continue. With the exception of that, we are very excited to see what the next couple of days bring. From the drive to our apartment I can tell this is an amazing city! Bye bye Australia, we miss you already...