We're coming back!

Hi everyone,

We're coming back to Australia for 1 to 2 weeks, arriving first thing on september 4th. Absoluelty can't wait, I'm most looking forward to eating Bakers Delight bread while reading the Good Weekend. And seeing everyone - of course. Hopefully I'll get to see you all.

Anyway, we've been having a nice time here in Texas. I've put the photos in first and I did it backwards, so the time line will be a bit off.

We just got back from a short holiday to Wimberley (which is between Austin and San Antonio in Texas). Paul had to go away for a few days to Chicago, so I decided I may as well see some more of Texas. We had a really great time. Being me, I didn't waste a minute of time and dragged the kids around seeing everything I could. They were pretty happy though. I think they like getting away from the usual schedule just as much as me. Went to these amazing caves called the natural bridge caverns. They had this set up where the kids could buy a bag of dirt and gravel with some rough gemstones mixed in. Then they could sieve away the dirt and gravel and pick out the gemstone - they absolutely loved it. I though it was bit fake seeing as the stones were planted in the bags, but the kids had no such notions. As you can see on Lindsays face...

We went o n a tour through the caves and saw some really awesome formations. To give you an indea of the size, check out the handrail sin the background...

It was all pretty amazing, but still really hot (you guessed it!), Ainsley was on the verge of being really scared, so I had to carry her most of the way and it was along way down and then up again. At the end Tallis was questioning me about why I was so grumpy. I said that if nobody talked to me for a good 5 minutes, I'd be right again. Still had a great day though. Afterwards we had to drive for 5 hours to get back to Dallas. Was a rather gruelling drive - I couldn't find my Ipod, only had one CD that I'd been listening to the whole time we were away, my classical station was playing some obscure opera (bleaugh), and my Jazz station shared air waves with a rock gospel station and didn't come into range until we were nearly home. Also the kids were watching DVDs on my laptop and so were useless for conversation. I remember the last hour I kept looking at the clock about every 3 minutes, each time being sure that way more time than that had passed.

This is the log cabin that we stayed in while we were away. It was very cool, and very authentic. The kids were a bit scared at night with all the animal noises, other than that, they said they'd like to live here. It was great being out of an apartment or hotel and being in the outside. The time we spent at the house was all spent sitting on the seats on the porch, or with the kids just poking around. Made me realise how badly they've had nature deficit disorder since we've been in Dallas. I was thinking about staying at a hotel in San Antonio for our little holiday, I'm so glad I didn't. Even though all the websites stated that it was only a half hour dirve to get to San Antonio and it was actually an hour and 15 minute drive, and thats with me sitting on the speed limit the whole way. Oh well...

We visited the city of San Antonio one evening and it was really gorgeous. There was this river walk that went for a good 2 mile, with beautiful gardens and water features the whole way along and restaurants and little stores as well. Felt like I was in another country. We went on a boat tour down the canals and there were heaps of scenes just like this...

We had dinner at one of these restaurants and a little 3 piece mariachi band came up and played the chicken dance song for us. The kids were very impressed, I though it was great too, but the poor guys playing just looked like they wanted to go home. I'm not suprised because guess what - it was super hot again. Its got to the point where 35 degrees is cool outside.

Also visited the Alamo. Didn't quite know what it was all about, something about a stand off between some white settlers and the mexicans and the whites fought off the mexicans from within the walls of the alamo for 15 days. It was all nice to look at though, misguided as we were. We wound up getting there really late, because Tallis forgot her shoes and din't realise until we were half an hour down the road, by which time it was too late to go back and get them (without missing out all together, so we had to stop off at a store and buy her a pair, which wound up taking half an hour. Anyway, heres a delighful photo of them all at well that was there.

In wimberley just near our little log cabin was this swimming hole. It was really deep with all these rope that the kids could swing off, and with beautiful big cypress trees with roots twisting down into the water. We really loved it here - this is Ellery swinging into the water.

So that was our trip to Wimberley.

Before that, from Dallas, we went a visited a diamond mine. It was totally different to what we expected. When I heard about it, I was expecting caves and picks and little miners helmets. It turned out to be huge ploughed up fields in an old crater of a volcano, in the middle of nowwhere. Its the 8th largest diamond mine in the world, but its owned by the parks and recreation part of the local government (in Arkansas), and people can just go there for $5 each and look for diamonds, which they get to keep. The day before we were there people found 8 diamonds, and sometimes people have found 5 carat diamonds. We didn't find any, but we did find some cool bits of Calcite and Quartz. And some broken glass that we were very hopeful about (oh dear). Heres what it looked like...

We also saw some more dinosaur footprints, at dinosaur valley state park. Heres Ainsley standing in one -

People keep asking to put more pictures of wierd and wonderful American things. So heres a normal can standing next to a bigger American can. Pauls pretty happy about this one (being beer and all). Some how its fosters, but I've never seen fosters like this in Australia....

Also, it was the 4th of July. Independence day. We went to a very amazing display of firewoks with a bunch of the homeschoolers. This isn;t a great photo, but this is how the fireworks started, out the back of a plane doing twists in the sky. You can see the smoke trail from where its been, and the huge crowds of people. It reminded me a lot of new years when I was pregnant with Ainsley (3 years ago) where it was in the low 40s. When we got back in the car afterwards, at about 10:30, the thermostat read 41. Ouch, but we had a great time anyway.

Well, thats about it for now. I'm a bit sick of writing, we've done way more than this, but mostly we've just been hanging out with our homeschool friends here.

Cheers,

Nic