My Fantastic New Years Eve

It is ages since I posted, and I don't even have any photos, but I wanted to write about the fantastic time I had on New years eve. It was a scorching day (38 degrees) and I spent half of it working at the Hospital.

It didn't feel like much of a day really, but then in the late afternoon Damien and I took the girls to a picnic spot on the Derwent River, just past New Norfolk. We met up with Matthew and Liz's family (we invited ourselves to their activity).

The river was perfect: there were large areas of smooth very slow moving water for swimming, and places that were shallow for little ones. The pebbly riverbed and banks were "Macca-Pacca heaven" for Hannah (2), who spent a lot of time just plopping perfect rounded river stones into the water toddler-style. The Dads and Matthew's boys skimmed stones, and then there was a lot of swimming about tossing a ball to each other. There were rapids towards the far bank for the big kids and also a couple of small "rock-pool" type safe spots for the young ones.

Can you imagine the coolness of river water next to the heat of the air? It was beautiful like Lenah Valley Creek and Goat Island.

Beside the river there was a nearly dry tributary (or maybe just a grey-water drain?) which turned out to contain a large pond full of trapped baby fish. Beth, Leila and Sophie spent some time catching the fish with their dinner bowls, and setting them free in the river. Covered in mud and happy as anything.

We'd brought along little portable cook tops, and had sausages, bread and fruit etc. for dinner. I had my swim then. It was really lovely.

It was still really quite hot as we packed everything up and we got into the car just as the thunder started. We sat watching the lightening for a while and then drove home. The storm seemed to follow us along the other side of the river. The lightening displays were fantastic - probably at least the second best Tassie lightening display I've ever seen. We stopped again to watch twice more on the way home. By the time we reached Lindesfarne the storm had made its way to the Eastern Shore, and then the rain absolutely bucketed down. I love the rain at the end of a really hot day: its like the whole world breaths a sigh of relief. It was so heavy that we had quite poor visibility and had to drive quite slowly.

Would you believe that the rain stopped as we pulled into our driveway? Damien and I were able to carry our sleeping children inside without them getting drenched!
A few minutes after we arrived home the power went, came back on again, and then died once more, so the rest of my evening with Damien was just the two of us and candlelight.

Perfection.