Holidays. As Leigh Sales also mentioned that she was feeling in her latest podcast, I was really hanging out for them. We had planned our decompression in three chapters: a short one with the girls having a sleepover with Maggie on the Saturday afternoon and night, so we were able to sneak out for dinner. Then a week in Jervis Bay, and the last one near Kiama, which I had never been to. I brought some relaxing holiday reading: Poster Boy, a well-written, self-reflective and thoughtful account by Peter Drew of being an activist artist producing enormous posters that he put up around Australia saying things like ‘Aussie’ printed below a photo of an African cameleer; and then Michael Caine’s memoir/insights from his life, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, promoting the benefits of hard work in whatever field you choose in your life.
The girls brought their roller skates and raced around the living area and courtyard of the first house we stayed in. The mornings weren’t busy for Steve and the girls, although I went for a run most days, and in the evenings we sometimes played the Uno game that was supplied. In the afternoons we mostly did some exploring.
In the whale and dolphin-watching cruise we joined, we got within about ten metres of a few whales, and a pod of dolphins played around the boat. The girls had such fun in the oversized speedboat crashing up and down the waves that they wanted to go again, and did with Steve a few days later on a bigger boat. For me, it wasn’t as good as the life-changing experience that Judith Lucy described, of swimming with whales in Western Australia in her podcast Overwhelmed and Dying, but it was nevertheless a rejuvenating and awe-inspiring experience.
Another experience that the girls had two bites of was gliding through the trees in flying foxes harnessed to ropes, which I also did with them the first time, and Steve both times. I didn’t want to let go thirty metres above the ground to launch myself towards another tree, but once I had done it once or twice, I thought it was fun too. The girls also did part of a loop walk of the Shoalhaven river and lush rainforest with me near there, and I explored other tucked away beaches in the area by myself some mornings, and the diverse, rich, large Booderee Botanic Gardens which contains meandering paths through a rainforest, around a lake, beside eucalypt lawns and past landscaped areas.
I listened to lots of podcasts during our holiday, including enjoying Julia Gillard’s series interviewing women leaders in many fields, A Podcast of one’s own.
Our start to the week in Kiama wasn’t auspicious: we couldn’t open the lock with the key and had to call a locksmith who lived an hour away, and it was already dark. This house was old, draughty and poorly heated, but it had a view of the sea and was only a couple of blocks from it. It was built in a craft style from the 1960s, with a lot of exposed bricks and wood panelling. The kitchen window angled out to a view of the houses populating the nearby hills, and the bath was long and deep. I ventured out to drive to a nearby rainforest walk one day, and we all had a connecting lunch at a nearby winery that could have been in France. Steve and I also snuck out for lunch in a beachside café in Kiama one day when the girls wanted to stay home and read: I had a delicious salad of roast sweet potato, mixed lettuce, grain and cauliflower, well dressed, and Steve had a tall burger, also bursting with goodies.
The week after a holiday is hard, but I have got through it. We’ve booked a couple of extra days skiing in a few weeks’ time, to break up the weeks of work that stretch through the rest of winter and to do an activity that the girls love.
We all got to relax on this holiday, and Steve and I did things with the girls and practiced listening actively to them.
I have now got into the routine of reading Rhea a couple of short books at night. And I will order some more from the library for the girls and I to look forward to in our winter evenings.
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