Monday, 4 March 2013

23 February – 1 March 2013 – Sunshine Coast and Gin Gin


Saturday morning we farewelled the Gold Coast and headed towards the “Sunshine” Coast… and sunny it was - finally!!  We had been offered to stay with our gorgeous family, the James family.  Jacqui, Adam, Teisha and Hunter though were not at home when we arrived but we nevertheless made ourselves at home by parking the van on the driveway and jumping in their lovely new pool.   This evening we went around to my cousin’s house, the awesome Adam Shelly and his wonderful two boys Nick and Tom, for dinner.  Ad’s even organised a gorgeous sunset for us.  The kids had plenty of fun dancing on the Wii (they are missing a few of these types of luxuries) and having a dip in the pool before heading back to our little home for a good night’s sleep.

The following morning, Sunday, we headed down to Alexander Heads to watch Teisha and Hunter do their last day of nippers.  How awesome are these kids… they did so well!  Afterwards, we met a few of their friends , had a bite to eat and the kids spent a bit of time swimming in the beach and collecting some lovely rocks off the beach for Jacqui.  We headed back to our “home” and relaxed a while with Adam and Jacqui, catching up on the last few years before Jacqui and I headed to the shops to do the grocery shopping.  Just our luck that not long after pulling in, the clouds opened up and the rain started to pour down.  Really though, it’s just a bit of water… more water!!  Dinner that night with the James family was fantastic and I loved that these four kids had so much in common and were getting along so well.

All day Monday was school work – boring!  By the time everyone was home, we just had some dinner and spent some more family time together.  It’s wonderful to catch up with these guys!

Tuesday was much the same.  The rain hasn’t stopped since Sunday evening so it’s a good chance to get as much school work done as possible.  I can’t say that the kids are enjoying it but there’s not much we can do about that.  Tonight we headed back to Ad’s house for dinner with him and Jo, another great night!  The kids loved playing Uno with the adults at the end of the night.  Josh perhaps not so much as he was the biggest loser of the night.

It didn’t rain all day Wednesday which meant we had a few hours to duck out of the house and see a bit of Buderim.  After a couple of hours of school, we threw on our wet shoes and went for a walk to Buderim Forest Park.  Here, there is a walking track into the open forest and rainforest, and we followed the track / creek all the way to a gorgeous waterfall that you could walk under/behind.  Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t good enough to swim and nor was it safe enough to with all that rain that we were experiencing – but it was gorgeous nonetheless – and fantastic to be back out in the open air.  We finished our walk just in time as we got back to the car and the rain had again set in… bugger!!  We enjoyed another fantastic dinner with the James family before heading out for coffee and ice-cream with Ads, Jo and her lovely 3 girls.  It was a pleasure to meet them and again the kids were pleased to be playing with more kids their age.

Thursday - We didn’t do much in the way of school work today but did sit the kids down for some online work this morning.  We then ducked up to Maroochydore to get Sami a new pair of sneakers from the sports shop before heading back to the caravan park to pack it all up.  Adam, Jacqui, Teisha and Hunter were heading to Hervey Bay so that Teisha could compete at the Nipper State Championships and we were going to head in the same direction with them.  Secretly I was hoping that the highway through Gympie was still going to be closed due to flooding.  If that was the case we were all going to have a camp out in our caravan on the side of the road and wait patiently for it to open.  However, we got to Gypie and the roads were opened.  There was still plenty of water lying about which was flooding all the low lying areas and you could notice the damaging effect of these waters to the rivers and creeks as you drove through.  We had tried to call a family friend at Maryborough on our way north but as there was no answer we decided to keep on driving.  With all the rain and flooding about, we decided to avoid Bundaberg this time and went straight to the bakery at Gin Gin for an afternoon snack.  We had no idea where we were going to stay the night and it was getting a bit late in the afternoon.  After driving a little further north from Gin Gin, Josh saw a sign with a boat ramp and camping pics so we veered right off the highway in search of somewhere to stop.  We came to a place called Lake Monduran.  It was spacious and clean and had very few people camped there – this was as good a place as any so we checked on in for the night.  We drove up to the dam wall where the water was spilling over.  There had been so much rain that the water was thundering down the spill and gave you a dizzy feeling just to watch it.  After setting up camp, and not being able to get ant TV signal, we found the cricket set and the four of us had a bit of a hit around the park.  Next were a few games of Uno followed by a family game of Trivial Pursuit.  After having a quick sausage sandwich for dinner, we settled down for a quiet night in.

Overnight the rain had really come down and it didn’t look like stopping all day Friday.  Lake Monduran had a great camp kitchen right near our van so we decided that with this weather, it was a great day to get lots of school work done.  We spent hours sitting outdoors doing school with the kids and really got through quite a bit of work.  I think it was about 5.00pm that we finished up so we got showered and ready for dinner and ready for a quiet night of TV.  The camp kitchen had a big TV that had great reception so we took our comfy camp chairs over and watched a bit of TV with the kids and two other campers, two French guys who didn’t speak much English at all.



















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