2450 km later....

Well, best laid plans and all that.... meaning that in order to get up and do the cliff walk we needed to be up and about well before the heat of the day had set in. On that Monday morning, a bleary eyed me rolled over to DH and said, "What time is it?" to which he groggily replied, "10:30...or something. I don't know. Go back to sleep." Ever the obedient wife (when it suits me of course), I did exactly that - which meant that any plans for enthusiastic cliff scrambling were well and truly buggered by the time we actually got out of bed some hours later. It was hot, damn hot - so DH wandered down to the local mall with the kids for lunch and a movie while I went to meet a friend for a long meander (for which I was rewarded with a fantastic back of the neck sunburn, but it was still worth it for the good catch-up.) (And probably if I *wore* my hat rather than held it in my hand, I'd have avoided said sunburn...but...you know, that would have been easy and not interesting to blog about at all.) We spent our afternoon as a family in Manly - one last wander onto the sand, one last Slurpee shared in the dying sun. The evening found us returning to Manly to have dinner with some Melbourne family members who happened to find themselves in Sydney at the same time. The joy of that dinner - other than the company and good food - was listening to my kids share their adventures with other adults. I was hugely proud of their ability to tell a good story, to convey their enthusiasm for all we had seen and done, and in general the way they carry themselves when in the company of adults other than their parents. Kiddos:  I'm hugely proud of you, and it's a great source of pride to me that you are growing up to be such engaging, interesting people.

A wander down the Corso (for yet one more last-last-last ice cream on the beach) and we were suckered into letting the kids try "Zorbing" (no idea why it's called that, but apparently all the cool kids know these things.) Zorbing is getting into a giant (as in human sized) hamster ball which is pumped full of fresh air, then the inflated ball is put onto a giant pool of water. The idea of course is to then imitate said hamster by standing up in the ball and running to make the ball turn in the water. Sounds easy, until of course you remember that hamsters do not achieve this on water, nor with many other balls rolling around them and making waves, nor with people standing outside the barrier and laughing their asses off at them. The kids, not surprisingly, had an absolute ball (pun intended- which is good, because the next day was less than happy!

On our last morning in Sydney I was woken at 6:30am by the plaintive cry of, "MUM! I'm vomiting!" which is just about the worst wake up call a parent can get (second only to your twelve year old waking you with, "Mum! I'm pregnant!")  My poor DD2 was feeling a bit under the weather - to say the least - and the poor thing still had to sit through a 6.5 hour drive.  With nothing for it, we bundled her and a bunch of plastic bags and paper towels into the car and headed for all points south.

I'll spare you the details (because they're not pretty) but suffice to say that by the time we reached Pambula on the Sapphire Coast of NSW (a full *9* hours later!), 2 girls were down for the count, and a third girl (that would be me) was not far behind. By midnight, DH had succumbed as well - meaning that 4/5 of us were less than healthy, with a hale and hearty DS feeling totally fine, the lucky bugger.  Oh but we were a pile of misery, weren't we? Wednesday was a health-enforced pyjama day, mostly because DD2 was feeling better, DD1 was kinda okay-ish, I was tettering between feeling okay and feeling shit, and DH was...well, I've seen him look better (grey as a complexion colour does not suit him.) The two healthiest kids did manage a good long swim in the motel pool - hooray for country motels with pools!  Happily enough for the emzee travellers, by this morning (Thursday) all of us were fighting fit and ready again for adventure. In a way I'm not sorry we got sick (but healthy would always be better if I had a choice) because it makes for a good story, and in a way we all needed a good day of sleep just to catch up after two weeks of craziness.  This morning we headed off to Magic Mountain in Meriumbula, and to prove our good health, we managed to spend close to 6 hours with the kids going mad on the rollercoaster, go-karts, toboggan run, water slides and bouncy castle. We gave the mini golf a miss (thank god. I hate being beaten at anything. :) ). We spent a lovely evening enjoying dinner at the local bowls club - all in all a really nice finish to a really nice day.

Tomorrow is our last day in Pambula and we have no specific plans, which is in many ways a pleasure and in some ways a worry as I feel as though we need to squeeze every moment we can out of this glorious time together before it comes to an end.  Saturday we've got a long drive punctuated by a long lunch with some friends at the half-way point to home, followed by another long drive as we roll back to Melbourne sometime in the early evening.

I have a lot of thoughts about this trip - some funny ones about the experiences we had along the way, some observations about who we met, what we did, and some funny Australian "culturalisms" I've noticed - but I'll share those in posts in the coming weeks. For now, while my writings chronicalling this trip have mostly been fairly dry in tone, that's because one purpose of this blog is as a legacy to my children, not just as a collection of amusing anecdotes. Someday I'd like them to read this and remember not only the highlights (of which there were many) but also the lowlites (of which there were few, but damn they were funny.)

My next entry is likely to be once we have returned home - but in the meantime the emzee band of merry travellers is exactly that - merry - and that's exactly how I like it.