Christmas in July

Imogen and I had our first experience of a rather strange, but completely understandable, tradition of our antipadian hosts and that is the Christmas In July.  I kid you not, a lot of these people have a second christmas celebration in July!!  Now at first I thought this was a rather daft idea but I guess it makes sense.  In Australia it is hot and balmy on 25 December which is entirely un-christmasy.  However, in July it is cold, misrable and usually wet.........just like those fond memories we pommes have of old blighty.

And so it was that the co-pilot and I found ourselves heading to Eaglereach in the Hunter Valley with the Sydney Sub-aqua Club for a fantastic knees up.  We arrived on Friday night after taking 2.5 hours to make the 60minute journey from Newcastle (where I am currently working) due to a combination of:

1. A cat that bolted for the door as we were leaving (40 minutes to find and catch the little bugger)
2. Called in to work to get wallet only to find they have an alarm system......half hour to wait for security
3. GPS that was 10km out on the location of the place and being lead up a 3km farm drive
4. Thick fog meaning it took us another hour to finally find the place despite being only 5km

But eventually we got there and a great place to get it was.  The place is a wilderness retreat on the top of a hill, which basically means lots of nature trails, wildlife and sleeping in fancy (really VERY fancy in many case) portacabins.  And the copilot got her fix of her new favourate native wild life - the kangeoo.

Well, enough chatter, here are some pictures:

The kangeroo's were pretty tame

 So tame in fact this little fella came and joined us for a beer

 and stuck around for about an hour and was pretty darn nosy.

Although sometimes, nature can be a bit too.......erm.....natural

 There were also a few great little off roading trails

which presented a few challenges for Jules and myself with a bit of trail building and rock crawling

and back at the ranch it was a good long soak in the hot tub

and then Saturday evening we were off to the restaurant for a great turkey dinner and a damn good knees up.  I'm afraid I don't have too many pictures of the evening itself (a bit too much vino to make the camera work.

Although I do have to say, and if you are opposed to open shows of affection (and I know they are rare from me), you know you have a stunningly good lucking wife when she can look this good even when she is 30 weeks pregnant:

I reckon I'm a pretty darn lucky bloke.

Well, most of the time