I love planning a holiday! There’s something bewitching about browsing through travel websites, planning, dreaming and organizing a trip. However, the next best thing to planning a holiday is to look back and relive the wonderful trips we’ve taken over the years. This post is my wander down travel-memory lane…
Neil and I only had two holidays together B.C. ( before children) Our Honeymoon was spent on a week-long driving tour of Tasmania. We had both been to Tassie previously with our parents and loved the little island. Like most honeymoons it went by in a bit of a post-wedding blur, but I think that trip cemented Tassie as one of my favourite Australian locations. The quaint country towns and the beautiful scenery around Hobart and the Tasman peninsula stand out strongly in my mind.
In 1983 we headed across country NSW to Broken Hill, then down to Adelaide for my first visit to South Australia and back along the Murray , then home via the Snowy mountains. It’s just as well we didn’t have kids back then…we needed the room for the several cases of wine that came back with us from the Barossa, Clare Valley and Murray River wineries that we visited along the way. Good times!
When the kids were very small the holidays were few and far between. Most of our short breaks were spent at Mum and Dad’s little holiday home at Blackheath. We spent our Easters eating well, enjoying the family get-togethers with Mum and Dad ( and occasionally more extended family ) and going for the odd drive to Bilpin and Mount Wilson. It was an easy, relaxed place to enjoy a few days away with very small children.
In 1992 I went back to work part-time teaching night classes at Tafe. For the first time in several years we had a second ( albeit small!) income coming in and I decided right from the word go that my contribution was going to pay for a “real” holiday. So we packed our bags, stocked up on Playschool audio tapes, piled the kids in the car and drove all the way to Port Macquarie for a week at the Lighthouse Beach Caravan park. We loved it, the kids were excited to see koalas wandering through the park, we ate take-away every night and Neil nearly had a heart attack when he thought Simon had been stung by a Blue Ringed Octopus down at the beach…just a bluebottle, thank goodness!
That trip was the first of our family driving holidays, and the kids will tell you today that they can’t remeber a driving holiday without the sounds of Dire Straits coming from the car stereo. Funny thing is, all neil and I can recall of the car soundtrack of that era was Playschool and Thomas the Tank Engine! The joys of travelling with small kids…
As the children grew we spread our net a little further and ventured as far north as the Sunshine Coast in Queensland We loved the region and stayed several times at Coolum and Alexandra Headland, where we could catch up with Owen and Margaret and their boys who had made their home in the area. The first time we went up we even took Simon and Erin on their first ever plane trip – that trip was a precursor of a bit of a plane travel jinx that we seem to carry with us – our flight to Maroochydore was diverted to Brisbane, where we sat for 2 hours in a hot plane while Qantas sorted out the technical glitch that put us there!
2004 saw the next big step in our travels – our first holiday away with someone other than immediate family and our first trip north of the Tropic of Capricorn! We spent a blissful 12 days staying at the Mirage Port Douglas and the Palm Cove Novotel with our good friends the Pearces and the Witts. Our youngest kids were all 5 years old and, subsequently, old enough to take advantage of the best thing ever invented for travelling parents – the Kids Club! Actually, our young friend Marcus was still only 4 but he’d been trained for weeks to say he was 5 just so he could join his buddies and give his Mum a well earned break.
I can still vividly remember my first sight of the Great Barrier Reef – we had taken a boat trip out to a floating pontoon and the first stop was down into the undersea level where I was overwhelmed by the sheer number, and beauty of the fish! We snorkeled and rode off in a submarine to see more of that extraordinary environment. It really, really is the GREAT Barrier Reef.
Our love affair with tropical Queensland continued with several more holidays to the area. In 1996 we enjoyed our first extended family holiday when we travelled to Yeppoon with (brother and sister-in-law) John and Carol to stay at the Capricorn International Resort. We tried all the resort activities – canoe trips, jetski rides, catamaran sailing, wetlands tours and the boys played golf a couple of times while Carol and I lazed by the lovely lagoon pool and watched Simon and Erin. Lots of lovely dinners and far to many cocktails, it was a great holiday! Neil and I enjoyed it so much we returned twice more over the next 4 years.
North Queensland has been a bit of a Mecca for the Anderson Clan over the years and we enjoyed another family holiday at Palm Cove with our nieces, Jillian and Tracey a few years later, when Liam was a littlie. The girls were great company and we had some great days out to Paronella Park, the Kuranda railway and an afternoon at Wildworld with (brother and sister-in-law) Ian and Lynette and the kids, who also just happened to be holidaying in Cairns at the same time.
In 2001 we started a new phase of our travel experiences – our first overseas holiday! All the way across the ditch to lovely New Zealand. I had been to N.Z. as a teenager with my parents but it was new territory to Neil and the kids, and they loved every minute of it. As well as being our first overseas holiday as a family it was also the only overseas holiday that all 5 of us have had together. So the trip holds a very special place in my heart.
One of the highlights was our overnight stay at Mt Cook and a 45 minute flight up onto the Tasman Glacier in a tiny plane. Once I got over the feeling that “we were all going to die!!!!!!”…. I had a great time 🙂 I’m ashamed to say that Erin and I also spent most of the trip quietly giggling at the variety of N.Z. accents we heard. Just why is “Fush n Chups” so funny????
By 2006 Simon was finished his school years and there was only one more trip that saw us all together as a family, but only for part of the time. On New Years day , all of us ( except for Simon) took our one and only cruise….on the Spirit of Tasmania. For a a few years in the early 2000’s the ship sailed a few times a week from Sydney to the Apple Isle. We sailed under the Sydney Harbour Bridge at noon and docked in Devonport next morning after breakfast. Fortunately we are all good sailors and , except for the noise and the disturbed sleep, had no problems with the massive storm that hit the ship in the wee hours of the night. However, there were many green faces the next morning and we had most of the breakfast buffet to ourselves!
Neil and I enjoyed revisiting many of the places from our honeymoon and introducing Liam and Erin to a new state. Simon flew down and joined us for the 4 days that we were in Hobart, and we put him on the plane back to Sydney with 2kg of chocolate – courtesy of the Cadbury Factory Tour.I just love Tasmania, and hope we get back there someday, but the year before we had taken our first holiday to a brand new destination. A country that won our hearts and just keeps luring us back….but that’s the subject of another post…