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Published: January 13th 2007
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Rain and Hail in Melbourne, Christmas morning!
And it was cold (14'C), with an antartic gale blowing - there was a white christmas on the mountains. What happened to summer in the southern hemisphere? To all our family and friends!
We hope you have had a great Christmas and New Year.
Christmas in Sunny (or not so) Melbourne! It's official, the mountains of Melbourne had snow!! We didn't get it in town, but we did have heavy rain and hail stone showers!! Not quite the weather for that barby on the beach we'd been thinking of and you thought we were having!!
Nonetheless Christmas day was lovely, we got up leisurely and Father Christmas had been, good job we wrote those letters to let him know where we would be! Our tree was a huge bunch of red lillies and purple gladioli which Ady bought for me on Christmas eve, the bin became a vase and we wrapped the red wrapping from the flowers around the bin. It looked pretty good.
A bottle of champers was uncorked and crackers were pulled so we had silly hats and bad jokes to give that home from home feeling!
Thanks to Mum, Dad and Sal, for our Yorkshire pudding mix, onion gravy, Lancashire Tea, marmite, chocolate and Christmas socks (which we did wear as it was cold!)... made us smile.... sadly only
one of the 3 parcels arrived, so we will be having christmas no 2 when we collect the other 2 parcels in Port Douglas at the end of Jan.
After opening our pressies and finishing our champers we took one of the free trams running on Christmas day to Brunswick St and found a lovely little wine bar called Gypsy for Christmas Lunch, it had a great atmosphere and fantastic food, it would be rude not to top it off with more Champers! We whiled away a couple of hours here.
As the rain had stopped we had to go to the beach, so we took a tram to St Kilda to find the Barmy Army playing cricket wearing hoodies and shorts in the cold and wind. We had a walk along the beach and almost got blown away.. time to give up and get warm!
The only other game in town was the Crown casino so we went back there for a warm. We had $20 each on the roulette table playing with the cheapest chips at $2.50 which was great fun. We played for a couple of hours and almost made a $100 at one
point.... then we lost it all. We watched some of the bigger stake tables in amazement and watched thousands of $'s be won and lost, it made our little tipple look like chicken feed!
We had Christmas dinner in a lovely restautant in the casino called the Waterside by the river.. I tested the Morton Bay Bugs a bit like lobster tails and lobster risotto and Ady tested the steak, was all very good especially when washed down with our 3rd bottle of bubbly... well it would have been rude not to!!!
New Years Eve- The fireworks in Sydney Harbour The first part of it was spent booking flights to Tasmania to see my friend Joey Howarth and her husband to be Dave and to finalise our flights to Broome and our campervan to Darwin.... the chores of a backpacker!!
Once sorted we made our way to Blues Point across the harbour about 3pm to meet friends Juliet and Jason and some of their friends. We'd already bought some bubbly but were told we couldn't take it with us as we had to go through a check point on the way in. Our initial thoughts were
to go over for a couple of hours, have a drink with everyone, then get the ferry back to near us to watch the fireworks and drink the champers we had bought.... when we arrived, they had a pretty good view and bottles of sparkly didn't break the bank, so we decided to stay and watch the 9pm fireworks and see how it went for the midnight ones...
Things were pretty calm when we arrived, no queues for the bar or the loos and police controlling the numbers, looked pretty good. There was also a sausage sizzler stall run by volunteeers, to soak up some alcohol. Pitty we weren't hungry now!!
As the night drew on things got busier... until there was a police line up stopping you getting near the loos, food and 1 of the 2 bars due to crushing, since we'd last been this way an hour ago there seemed to be lots more 14yr olds falling over and puking up while drinking "fanta and coke" from their plastic bottles!!
So no food for us.... and I'm not good when I've not been fed, as Ady will tell you!!
The 9pm fireworks were
pretty spectacular and moving on to watch the midnight ones didn't seem too appealing. Ady and I joined the queue at the only bar which we could get to for some more sparkly, time went pretty quickly...
About 10 to midnight we'd been served beer as sparkles had run out and I was having a moan about being hungry and us not bringing any food with us, when Mr Smith got himself all in a tis and said "it's not meant to be like this!"!! and asked me to marry him!!! That put a stop to my hunger, I'll tell you!! Not quite the down on one knee option, but still pretty good!! So I agreed!!! We wandered back to Ju and Jay grinning like cheshire cats and within seconds the midnight fireworks went off, which again were pretty amazing..... What timing hey!!
After the fireworks we waited about an hour for the ferries to re-start, Ju and Jay decided to walk over the bridge. Ady then treated me to a MacDonalds in Circular Quay-- what a lucky lass I hear you say. The hunger was coming back by then, we'd not eaten since 11am!! and it was
the first edible thing we's seen for 13hrs!! I have memories of a Macky D's at a similar time last time we were here 8 yrs ago, and I don't touch the things at home!!!
I woke up on New Years Day wondering if I'd dreamt it all!! But saw I was wearing my big dobber amber ring on my wedding finger and Ady confirmed it.... Now to ask for Mr Jacko's blessing.....
Not sure if you all know, but Ady and I were both in Sydney Harbour 8 years ago watching the fireworks on the rocks about a 100 yards apart, but we didn't know each other. Woodsy's comment (one of Ady's mates) on hearing our news was was that he should have bumped into me and done it 8 yrs ago, saving a lot of time! Ah, but would I have said yes then?
Ok, time to sign off. Hope you all had a great holiday season, and we hear from you soon.
Nic and Ady x x x
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angi
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more installments please...
so romantic - i love it !!