A busy couple of days (part 1)

Sunday

Sunday dawned, if you could call it that 'cos we couldn't see the sun, with heavy showers and more clouds than we had seen so far. I had picked Sunday to go on the Skyrail because the weatherman had said that the rain would be clearing; he didn't mention that it would be at midnight into Monday!

The Skyrail trip was still worth it and, to be perfectly honest, I'm kind of glad it was overcast because that meant that we couldn't always see how high up we were! We went through the clouds and were even above them for most of the middle leg of the journey. The kids were a bit underwhelmed in stages (due to not being able to see much) and Bradley was a bit scared of the whole thing, but I think that was due to Bec's teasing and Lachlan's very matter-of-fact statements about 'if we fall, then we die' and 'if we crash into another car, then we die' and ... oh I'm sure you get the picture!

There's a limit of six people to a car/gondola so Bec and I took a car each with whichever kids wanted to go with us at the time. Kathryn attached herself to Bradley so wherever he went, she went. He nicknamed her "The Limpet" and "The Barnacle" and was starting to get a bit frustrated with her when I said that he had to come with me so we could have a photo of the just the four of us at the last station. The look of relief on his face was almost comical!

It was still raining quite heavily when we got to Kuranda and when we phoned the big boys to find out where they were, they told us to walk up the hill to the cafe. Not happy Jan! We all got pretty wet and once we got there, they had decided that it was too expensive to have lunch in Kuranda. Bec and I ordered the kids a milkshake each and a drink for ourselves and then popped into the shop next door to have a look at the 'hippy clothes' (made from hemp and organic cotton).

After that it was a matter of dodging the really heavy downpours to get up the rest of the hill and back to the cars. Because I kept holding them up by daring to actually look in some of the shops and Peter decided to buy himself a new hat, we ended up having a late lunch at the bakery at the very top of the village (and it worked out heaps cheaper than going to McDonald's!) Score one for me!! We had planned on going to the Butterfly Sanctuary but the big boys wanted to go out to Mareeba cemetery for some photos of family headstones and due to it getting late for the little ones, off we went. We wandered all over the cemetery and found what they were looking for about an hour later, then it was time to head back 'home' for dinner.

Peter and I have obviously forgotten what it's like to have little kids as we couldn't believe the day was over, that is we were back 'home', by 5pm! We could have gone out to do something else, but decided to chill out in front of the TV ... just like at home.