Road trip!

The important thing to remember is that Gary (and Alex) saw a sea turtle. The rest blurs together a bit so just remember that!

But before we come on to that...

We had a 12 hour road trip up to Brisbane! This was very exciting. So in the car was Gary, Cat, Gill and Alex and we had many hours filled with "driver revivers" and games like spotto and contact and any other games we could think of at the time!

We even managed to get some fish and chips at the seaside, complete with the infamous chicken salt!

All very exciting, but the most exciting thing was what happened the next morning! Santa came! We had stockings and exchanged presents.

We went to a church run by one of Cats friends Dad and we all had our festive hats on! We got a few strange looks as no one else in the congregation did...

So after, we were invited to a traditional Australian Christmas dinner, which of course we eagerly accepted! Not quite the traditional shrimps on the barbie as it turns out they are Zimbabwean. So we had a traditional Zimbabweans-do-English-style-Christmas-dinner-in-Australia! Something like that anyway.

We were all wearing summer gear and even managed a swim in the pool and a bit of frisbee in the afternoon! It was amazing and very enjoyable but it felt very peculiar to be having a hot Christmas!

Other escapades included chilling out on the beach and popping over to Moreton island. This is when the Gary incidents started. To set the scene, Moreton island is a sand island (similar to Fraser but without the tourists) and there are pockets of dune desert throughout. So we tried our hand at sand boarding. Gary went first and managed to stick the front end of the board into the ground whilst travelling at speed, which sent him hurtling down into a slow motion face plant of the sand. All very funny until we realised that he was actually concussed and started to lose his vision. This was where Gary first made contact with a healthcare professional. A first aider. Twice.

So after a bit of a relax, we were all feeling better and decided to go snorkelling. They have sunk about 10 wrecks within 50 metres of the shore so we swam out. Gill had a bit of a freak out when she remembered what was in Australian seas and couldn't see the bottom but eventually we made it over to them. We saw loads of fish cruising in between the bits of rusty metal. Then we heard it. A spluttering, half drowning half too excited to remember to breathe shout of "sea turtle!" We swam over to have a look and Alex managed to sneak a peak before it left but Gill didn't quite. In Gary's haste to follow it, he kicked out and cleanly sliced open the top of his foot on a metal shard! It was an anatomists dream as you could clearly see the individual tendons! To cut (pun partially intended) a long a story short, that day Gary also saw two lifeguards, a paramedic and whilst at hospital, a triage nurse, a junior doctor, registrar and consultant and had 3 stitches. His plans of running in the blue mountains were cut short (that pun was intended) as he was told he had to be 2 weeks non weight bearing on crutches! Don't feel too sorry for him. He loves the attention and even fell over in front of a crowded restaurant because he was losing a race!

But his foot had other positives and negatives. A bad point was we had to push him around a zoo in a wheelchair. But he very much made up for it because when we headed back to the new years celebrations in Sydney, Gary and I were allowed into the limited mobility area for the children's fireworks so got an amazing view!

We still had to queue from 730am but it was very much worth the wait. The theme was called "shine" and the midnight sky was lit up for a solid 15 minutes of amazingness!

But after a night of sleeping rough at the airport and saying our goodbyes, it was back to just us 2 as we were NZ bound!