3,190 klms

That's how far we travelled on our holidays after Christmas. We were away for 13 days and had such a wonderful time visiting family and friends and many new places.

Our first stop was Coffs Harbour to visit John's sister, brother-in-law and nephews. We brought our bicycles and went for a ride along the boardwalk through the mangroves. Afterwards Jo took me to visit her favorite shop, big mistake. So many beautiful goodies - some had to come home with me.

We had a great time with Jo, Roger, the boys and their beautiful Labrador, Rocky.
Next stop was our dear friends, Diann and Bill's, in Queensland.  On New Year's Eve we decided to go for a motorbike ride to the Gold Coast for breakfast

 

but the weather became very nasty and we turned back after about 20 kms.  We went to the pictures that evening to see "We Bought a Zoo" - lovely movie.

At the pictures

New Year's Day John and Bill went for a ride while Diann and I stayed home to stitch and watch the next series of "Downton Abbey".  We managed to see two episodes before the boys returned. 

Diann and I also fitted in a bicycle ride and we all went to the beach on the Gold Coast.  My brother and sister-in-law were next on our itinerary to visit.  They live in Brisbane and the bicycle tracks around their suburb and beyond are brilliant.  We rode out towards Nudgee Beach one day and then towards Paddington the next.  We met up with Diann at Carindale for a bit of shopping (bought an iPad) while Paul and Lynette were at work, visited my brother's shop where John found lots of goodies he had to have (angle grinder, nail gun, drill, camera) and then we went to a beautiful restaurant in Ascot for dinner.

The following day we drove back to Coffs Harbour via Mullumbimby to stay one more night with Jo and Roger then drove down to Lake Cathie to visit my other brother and his family.  Was lovely to catch up with all of them.

The National Motorcycle Museum at Nabiac was the next stop.  John spent hours in there.  The museum has over 820 motorcycles on display and I think John photographed each one.  After a while I went back to the car to read my book. 

We stayed in Lochinvar that night en route to Dubbo.  I haven't been in this area before.  Elizabeth wanted a souvenir from Dunedoo

so we stopped there for lunch and found an embroidered tea towel for Elizabeth.  Turns out the couple who run the tea shop live about 10 kms away from us and travel to Dunedoo every fortnight to open their Tea Shoppe.  Delicious lunch and lots of home made goodies.  We arrived in very hot Dubbo on Saturday afternoon and after some quick emals and sms's, we arranged to have dinner with the lovely Peg and her husband James.



Photo from Peg's blog

It was so wonderful to meet up with my long-time on-line buddy and we very much appreciated that Peg and James drove to Dubbo at the last minute to have dinner with us.

Sunday we went to Dubbo Zoo.  We've been wanting to visit the zoo for over 30 years and I was so happy to be there.  It is a great place to visit and wonderful to ride around, although a bit hot that day.

Monday we drove to Bathurst via Mudgee (what a lovely town).  I wanted to go to Bathurst to visit Hatched and Patched - years and years ago I visited Annie's first shop but hadn't been to the new one.

When I walked into the shop Annie told me that it was the first day of the shop's annual sale.  What a treasure trove the shop is.  I'll leave my shopping and stitching for another post.  Have to work out how to post photos from the iPad to blogger.

As it was still reasonably early (3.30 pm or so) we decided to drive home and that was the end of our holiday.  This week has been a busy time of washing, packing up the Christmas decorations, taking my sick computer to the shop (using John's at the moment and it's not being friendly), Elizabeth is here for a visit etc.

Happy New Year - here's hoping for a healthy, wonderful year for everyone.