The Beginning of the End

The events leading up to the end of Australian Adventure Part 1 are not extraordinary, just noteworthy. 

First, there was packing.  We avoided it like the plague.  It was messy, confusing, and there's never quite enough space.  Things we found to do while avoiding packing included chatting on Facebook, oven roasting chickpeas, looking through pictures from Pastor John from the last 4 months… stop the presses.  This is more important than whatever I was saying. 

I'm sitting here in the airport trying to tell you about the things I did to get here, and there's a family to my left with a kid with dreads.  Repeat: kid with dreads.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a first for Little Miss Sunshine.  I have seen dreads as a conscious choice or unconscious consequence of twenty somethings, but never have I ever seen them on a kid.  There's a chance that it could have just happened, and Sparky Jr. just wouldn't hold still long enough for a haircut, or that Mom was too busy chasing kids 1, 2 and 4 to bother with a haircut for poor middle child #3.  And they're in the airport - the whole family, and Dad is lugging his own weight in carry on bags.  Merry Christmas in the airport.

So we finally stopped avoiding packing long enough to pack.  I managed with two checked bags and a book bag.  Then there was tea.  Remember, tea is what Australians call dinner.  Joan was out with tennis club Christmas festivities, so it was Ian and us fending for ourselves.  We sat down to an old Aussie/Brit classic - meat and three veg.  That means we had corned beef heated up in the microwave and steamed peas/potatoes/carrots. 

Ian took us down to the church to drop off the things we're leaving here at the church.  He's a sweet man.  Then he showed us around the factory he's been renovating.  Yeah, don't forget he's 74.  I'm not talking renovating like supervising, I'm talking renovating like painting and doing tile.  He dropped us off at the beach to walk home the pretty way. 

We had visions, not of fairy plums, but of a nice sunset walk on the beach for our last night in Oz for a few weeks.  That was alright the first few minutes, before the rocks.  There was a rocky stretch of beach between us and home, so we tried to pick our way over and around and through without slicing our bare feet open.  This led us to climbing a bluff, climbing a fence, and hoofing our way back to the house in the dark. 

After that there was a drop in to an 18th birthday party, and the discovery of the absence of my camera.  That was a problem.  I was leaving the hemisphere and my camera was missing.  The next morning I hit the snooze on my 5AM alarm and was slipping on my boots at 5:30.  Sometimes I think I do as much running out of running clothes as I do in them.  Anyway, off I went down the hill in search of the camera.  It was precisely where I figured it would be.  There was only one place I could remember being less than vertical, and that was when I was climbing the fence.  The camera was sitting there in the grass, right where it had slipped out of my jacket pocket.  Recon mission accomplished, back to the house. 

From there, Pastor John picked us up and dropped us off at the airport.  Checked in, made it through customs, and parked ourselves on an airport bench, got on a plane, and made it hoooooome!

Love from HOME,

LMS