Catch-Up Blog: Australia, China and America ..we get around!

January 28th: Mannum

We hopped in the car and headed for the hills! But as we do that quite often, we drove a bit further until we found signs directing us to new places, and ended up in Mannum. Mannum is on the Murray River, which, a bit further up, is the border between Victoria and New South Wales. The Murray is SA's main water supply so it's a worry that we could see how low it had dropped just by looking at the bank on the other side in places. SA is also at the end of the line for water; the upstream states and irrigators get it first and we get what's left.

http://www.mannum.org.au/

There are lots of boats and waterskiers; we looked in a museum and there's also a gemstone place which we didn't get to, but Liam would love to see next time. He also wants us to drive to Victoria one day.

A couple of cute snapshots:

Liam ROFLing at the slapstick humour of Bugs Bunny and friends:

EJ sleeping with the duck Sean and Louise gave him four years ago when he broke his arm.
The duck has a sling. EJ also has his ginger cat under his ginger head:

February 8th:Chinese New Year Dinner:

We went out with a few friends and family for Chinese New Year.

The boys were a tad concerned when drums and cymbals and gongs suddenly and very loudly started crashing! In danced Buddah and a dragon (or a lion). The dragon was worrying for a while but they got used to it and Liam even fed it some money in a lucky Chinese envelope (lucky for those who receive money in it!). We had wondered why there was a lettuce hanging from the ceiling; the dragon stood on his hind legs and ate it.



There was also a martial arts (sword fighting!) demo which prompted all the kids in the restaurant to fight each other for the rest of the evening.

More about this on Dad's blog: http://dadbstuff.blogspot.com/



February 17th: All American Car Show

This was riiiiiight up the boys' alley! Liam's all-time favourite car is the '67 Mustang. He wants to buy one one day and restore it, which I think is a great thing for a boy to be able to do in this day and age, and also a great thing to think of already at his age. There were lots of Mustangs at the car show, old....
...and new! This one looks like an overgrown Hot Wheels toy!...



EJ's favourite car is the Plymouth Superbird (I don't think he knows or perhaps cares yet that there's an EJ Holden!). There weren't any Superbirds there but he found a nice shiny Plymouth Bellevue:
We also saw a Hudson Commodore, which is not a Holden Commodore, and not quite a Hudson Hornet as in the Disney movie Cars, but close enough!



Some classics deserved to be there just because they had wooden spokes:


..and others only try to be classic and I don't know what they were doing there! Personally, I don't like PT Cruisers but the boys do and they liked the paint job on this one:




There were lots of other cool cars there but I think this blog is long enough, and I've covered the boys' favourites!