Week with Wade and Melissa-Part 2

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Day 143-145

26^th-28^thJanuary

The morning found us donning our Australia tops and covering ourselves in Australian tattoos. We loaded up the car in the morning with a serious amount of alcohol and other things we needed for the day and headed off to our location for the day. A field. With enough space for the lads to have their annual Australia Day Cricket Match and for the rest of us to set up a gazebo and spend the whole day sunbathing and knocking back the alcoholic slush puppies! We were joining lots of Wade and Melissa’s friends and we had a lovely day in the hot sunshine getting really rather drunk, which we were reliably informed is the best way to celebrate Australia Day.



By the time darkness fell, Wade, Ellory and I were pretty well drunk and poor Melissa had to deal with us as she drove us all home. Funniest moment included Wade trying to get Melissa to stop at KFC for dinner, and when told that in fact we had dinner waiting for us at home, insisted that the KFC was in fact for dessert!



So that was our first part of our Australia Day celebrations and the next part took place the following day. Wade and Melissa had bought tickets for a festival called Big Day Out. Big Day Out takes place in lots of cities around Australia and New Zealand and Sydney in fact had two festival dates. W & M had tickets for the Thursday 27^th January and fantastically, the organisers had decided that whoever had bought tickets for that day could bring a friend for free! So that was Ellory and I sorted! Once again, there was a big group of wade and melissa’s friends going and they had hired a big minivan for us all to travel to Sydney in. It was a fairly long journey there and we had to have a mcdonalds pitstop to keep us going. But eventually we arrived at the Sydney Olympic Park where the event was to be held. It was really cool to see it after watching the Sydney Olympics on television way back in 2000. We were able to park our van for free (somehow!) and we headed in. There were 15 of us in the van and we all had bands we wanted to see, so we decided to split up and meet up at various points throughout the day. Ellory and I managed to see LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A, Plan B, Primal Scream, The Stooges and Wolfmother. Plan B was definitely our favourite, he was completely amazing live and we loved the fact we had been able to see him for free! We wandered around seeing little bits of lots of bands who’s names I can’t remember the names of with regular stops for food and drinks. No burger and chips at this festival! I managed to have yummy dim sum and Ellory had some food from the Hare Krishna stand which smelt amazing and I am reliably informed tasted delicious as well.



We had so much fun at Big Day Out and it was so great that we’d managed to go, the timing ended up being perfect! Cheers Wade and Melissa.



We were all pretty tired the next day, it had been two loooong days so Friday was a designated chill day. We lazed around in the morning and then Wade and Melissa took us out to lunch at the nearby golf club. ‘The Golf Club’ was a completely foreign concept to us. In England you only go if you want to play golf. In Australia you can go for lunch there and there are always loads of slot machines. Bizarre. We were signed in as guests and had a massive lunch and the obligatory go on the slot machines, those things confuse the heck out of me, so strangely enough I didn’t win anything!!



After our massive lunch we fancied some dessert and we were taken to a very popular ice cream shop in town. It had so many flavours of ice cream and sorbet! It was delicious and we all walked out with massive cones piled high with ice cream which we had to eat quickly so they didn’t melt all over us in the Australian heat. We rounded up the day by driving to Kiama to say goodbye to Wade’s mum and dad who had been so lovely to us. Wade’s mum even gave us a bag of Koala keyrings as a little goodbye present!



We’d had such a great week with Wade and Melissa, thank you guys for being such great hosts!

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