Winter holidays. Boy, was I due for them! I’d been flat out at work – no time for a lunch break in three weeks, then the girls developed successive viruses with high fevers, I developed whooping cough and the girls and I rounded it off with conjunctivitis and pneumonia respectively. Steve had a few days of sickness in there too, luckily hardly overlapping with me at all. After a long bus ride in the first leg of the trip, the dash to catch the plane before our luggage was offloaded was the second last struggle, the final one being wrangling a couple of very tired girls with fifty pieces of luggage (including car seats) for the hire-car transfer and half-hour drive to our apartment at Noosa.
Oh, it was idyllic! Gratefully welcomed with a good bottle of wine, cheese and biscuits, chocolates and nougat that we sampled for supper, we sank into bed in exhaustion. The next morning we saw from the windows of the two-bedroom apartment a beach-fringed, grass-fronted river, where from the living area upstairs we could watch ferries, small boats and pelicans drifting along regularly. There were fishermen dotted all along the river throughout our week-long visit, and one day we saw a pelican swallowing a small fish caught by one of these fishermen and donated to the pelican just metres from the apartment, prompting Rhea to later observe: ‘We eat fish with the head cut off, but pelicans don’t because they don’t have a knife.’
The weather was perfect: still and early twenties all week, so we had some time at different beaches, including our own. We did a lovely rainforest walk at Noosa National Park; clambered on rocks on the coast; ate some outrageously good ice-creams (chocolate and raspberry eaten in our hands after it fell out of the cone while driving, and chocolate and blueberry yoghurt); and Steve and I had our usual holiday indulgence of taking turns to sleep in to 11am. I bought a summer top in a rare shopping expedition; and we ate some lunches and dinners out in elegant restaurants, including lunch at a ferry stop followed by a ferry cruise. We discovered a French patisserie/deli/restaurant where we gorged ourselves in atmospheric surrounds (Bali breeziness meets French style) and shopped at the weekend farmers’ market, where we bought heirloom tomatoes, snap peas and other super fresh fare. We were somewhat reluctant to leave after a week, but our next accommodation in Ballina beckoned.
A three-and-a-half hour drive south, we stopped along the way and bought some oversized, sweet strawberries that we ate en route and arrived in Ballina in early afternoon. The weather wasn’t as good, some days were cool and some cool and windy (washing-dry-in-half-an-hour windy), but this apartment was also river-fronted, two-storied and decorated very tastefully with glass vases in complementary shades of blue (straight in the cupboard for our stay), simple original artwork on a beach theme and restful white linen and curtains. The large bedrooms (ours overlooking the sloshing Richmond river below) reminded me of the large, breezy, old-fashioned bedroom in Alison Lester’s children’s book ‘Magic Beach’, in which all the children share the old bed which is ‘cozy and wide.’ The next door neighbour was so friendly that by the last day, the girls were hanging out in her apartment while she shared photos of her grandchildren with them and gave them a necklace of rosary beads each – pink for Rhea and blue for Lara.
Steve took the girls to storytime followed by craft at the local library (they made a ‘wobbly man’ out of coloured paper (wobbly’ because the legs were creased), which they both enjoyed. We had an excursion to nearby Lennox Head (not too cold for the girls to dip and race the wave edges in); another lovely rainforest walk; and a day in busy nearby Byron Bay, where we found a balcony restaurant with plates and plates of tasty Greek seafood with impeccable grilled veggies. The girls played on the beach as the wind died down; and we saw a dolphin.
One of the highlights of this week was hiring a seven-seater ‘BBQ boat’ for a day (BBQ not used, we just brought sandwiches). Steve’s hat fell in the water just minutes out from shore but he managed to navigate over to it and I fished it out before it sank, much to Lara and Rhea’s excitement. Steve motored the boat along the river to a couple of more sheltered canals and we saw tens of pelicans and other birdlife as we cruised along.
The girls loved the activities we did, the warmer weather, and the water. Just as importantly, they loved having us to themselves for two weeks. The soundtrack to this holiday was the Beatles song that they discovered and were captivated by from Steve’s iPhone: ‘Love, love, love.’ Lara would sing it to herself, and Rhea sometimes too. They fought sometimes, and cried sometimes, but we were both there to get through that, which made all the difference.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite clips from the holiday. It’s the simple joys that are the best.
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*’Yay’: An expression that Steve uses that the girls, especially Rhea, have adopted.
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