Rowkin Rovings Blog

It has been a very hectic last week in Australia. Last weekend saw us being extremely social with catching up with our good friend Nick who came down from Brisbane to Melbourne to catch up with us.

Friends Gayle and Darren were also in town, visiting from Perth, so the opportunity was taken to have an evening out at Elwood Bathers restaurant. We had an absolutely lovely meal with great company to boot.

Earlier in the day we had lunch at the Botannical Gardens with old friend Nick Loftus and his family at a Vietnamese/French fusion restaurant. The food we had there was out of this world and a taste sensation for the taste buds.

As you can imagine, we are going to have to roll ourselves onto the plane.

We all took a deep breath and decided to brave it and go to see a movie in an actual theatre – first time in over two years for us. We won’t tell you what we saw but those of you in the know will guess it by what is on the T-shirt in the picture. It was a brilliant movie and tied up a lot of loose ends that had been created by the previous movies.

You know how you think you are doing something nice for someone and it turns out that you are actually creating a further level of complexity in their life – well, we achieved that quite comfortably for Fraser’s 89 year old mum. Barb loves a daily coffee and we thought we would purchase her an espresso machine for her birthday/Mother’s Day present. Even with our two heads put together, we couldn’t work it out. We have now referred this problem across to Fraser’s brother and his wife who are visiting from Adelaide next weekend.

So, Australia is off to the polls on the 21^st May and Barb received the postal ballot for the senate – so who on earth is going to be bothered or even know how to list the 60 odd candidates in preferred order as is the requirement. Politics gone crazy. Typical Aussie lingo shows how they have shortened the names of the two main party leaders. They have Scomo versus Albo – that is Scott Morrison versus Anthony Albanese. The other confusion for us is that the Liberals in Australia are called the Conservatives in Canada and the Labor party in Australia is the Liberals in Canada – go figure. Oh, and the muck raking in Australia is the same as in Canada.

On Tuesday evening, we caught up with our friends Dominque and Belinda and their boys and were surprised by the appearance of some old friends from our Muswellbrook days. We had not seen Linda and Geoff for nearly 25 years and it set the chunky feeling in your stomach that time has gotten away from you. We had a ball playing UNO and another card game called Golf and came away with aching midsections caused by laughing.

Our last night in Australia, so tidying up some loose ends and finishing it off with Fraser’s favourite sausage rolls that is mum makes from scratch. Now just dreading the flight home to Canada which will take approximately 22 hours. Worse than that though, is the start of 3.00am – we suggest that our friends in Calgary not bother acknowedging our presence until the weekend as we are going to be like a couple of bears with sore heads.

Toque has now left Calgary. Joannie and Simon flew back to Montreal on Monday with her in the cabin. News reports back indicate that she travelled very well and was quite the hit at Calgary airport when it came to the cuteness factor. She will spend the next five months in a total French immersion experience.

So that does the blog postings for the moment until we set out from Calgary to the UK on the 17^th May as we begin another odyessy on the canals of Scotland and the UK.