A break from travels

Sunday morning - Matt leaves for Sydney.
Sunday evening - Alice leaves for Darwin (school camp).
Sunday evening - Matt gets food poisoning and has a very unpleasant night.
Monday evening - Matt (feeling somewhat better) flies to Melbourne.
Tuesday morning - Felicity leaves for Sibu Island in Malaysia (school camp).
Tuesday evening - Matt has a great dinner with his family in Port Melbourne.
Tuesday evening - Lucinda has a rare night alone.  Netball gets cancelled due to a thunderstorm.
Tuesday night - Matt surprises the Bearsleys at Melbourne airport.  Selecting the same return flight as them was deliberate.  Getting assigned the seat next to Anna was destiny.
Wednesday morning - Bearsleys and Matt arrive in Singapore at 5:30am, welcomed to The Regency by Lucinda before she heads to work.
Thursday night - Alice arrives home from Darwin and Kakadu.  Has had an amazing camp and seems to have done so much we don't know when they ate or slept.
Friday early - no sign of the bus that is due to pick us up at 6:15am.  Luckily is waiting around the corner when we call - driver hadn't been told of change from original time of 7:30am.
Friday morning - smooth trip through checkpoints and into Malaysia, get to the Felicity meeting point in plenty of time.  Felicity is handed over on her way back from Sea Gypsy on Sibu Island.  Has also had a great time at camp.
Friday 11:30am - are five iPads for eight people too many?  Or too few?
Friday noon - we board the speedboat for transfer to Rawa Island.

We relax.

Order cocktails, mocktails (Shirley Temples are the girls' favourite) and hot milos (Seb's favourite).

Read.  Relax.  Eat.

Go snorkeling.  Kayak around the island.  Jump of the jetty.  Find our one hundredth geocache.

Eat. Read. Relax. Drink. Play cards for the first time in years.  Go snorkeling again.  Play Mafia.

Get to sit on the beach in the warm tropical night, pretending the kids are asleep in the hut behind us and watching an awesome lightning storm in the distance.

Days pass.

And finally we have to leave.  A great long weekend on a tropical island.

Sweet Sixteen and the heart grows fonder

While Matt jets off overseas, this girls and I have filled in the time. We had a lovely afternoon at Sentosa with Sir Kiwi - Felicity's class mascot. No guessing which country her teacher comes from. Sir Kiwi is given to the Star of the Week and you get to take him with you for the weekend and have a photo that goes up up on the class wikispace. We think Felicity's photo idea (below) with Sir Kiwi is awesome.

With Matt gone, I have gotten a bit used to attending parties by myself. First was Sri from work's wedding which was a wonderful fusion of Indian and Western meets a little bit of Chinese and then my friend Pen's 40th birthday which was a 1920's theme. Best celebration was Matt returning the morning of our 16th Wedding Anniversary and organising a three course meal in the cable car to Sentosa. It was beautiful with the view constantly changing as day turned to night. We had a nice family day on Saturday - went to Pinnacle @ Duxton for the cheapest and best view of Singapore and then did a spot of geocaching - finding our 99th cache!

A Weekend in Germany

Over the weekend I rented a car and embarked on some sightseeing.  Saturday was Stuttgart with James and Cyrus.  The built-in GPS in my Mercedes took us straight to the center of town and we found a carpark next to the town hall.  We wandered past a farmers market in the city square, admiring the historical architecture and somewhat lamenting the more modern concrete squares.  As the home to major Mercedes Benz factories, Stuttgart was heavily bombed in the war.  We did like the large amount of pedestrian-only streets.

At the end of the day we dropped James at the airport before heading on to the University Town of Tubingen.  It was just falling dusk but Cyrus and I were very impressed with the old architecture and cobbled streets of the historical center.  I liked it so much that I went back alone on Sunday morning to explore it further.  Being a Sunday, nothing was open and it was fairly quiet, but it was just very beautiful to see all these really old buildings.  I then climbed up to the castle which had first been built almost a thousand years ago and then expanded and modernized over the centuries.  It had a great vantage point high above the river and town.

The afternoon took me to Ludwigsburg which is famous for its baroque palaces and gardens.  Being the end of winter, nothing was blooming yet in the gardens, but the palaces were impressive to walk around.   The smaller, orange-y Favourite Palace was built only 500 meters away from the Residence Palace as a retreat and hunting lodge.  It seemed strange that they were so close together.