Day 1 - to Mitchell

We left Brisbane today! I won't be there for four weeks, and the rest of my family won't be there again for four months!!! Wow! We'll be travelling the first week with dad's parents - up to Mt Isa.

We left about 7:30 (1 1/2 hours after the planned 6:00 start!) Our awesome cousins saw us off. My littlest brother was asleep until about 7:15, and mum joked that we’d better not forget him! He was wrapped up in his bed blanket for the first few hours of the trip!

Our first stop was at Toowoomba, which was freezing cold - 6.8 degrees, 2.4 with the chill factor. And to think that it's 13 degrees in Brisbane! Mum got out the first time up there, and was back in the car within two seconds. Anyone would think we’d just landed in Greenland, the way we were dressed (okay, maybe not quite so bad!).

There’s some flower festival in Toowoomba at the moment, so there’s masses of flowers everywhere. It’s really amazing, but we didn’t hang around long – we were quite frozen after a few minutes!

We ate muesli and yoghurt for breakfast (at 9:3 in the morning!), and lost Nanny and Pa. While we were walking around the gardens, we met a lady walking a poodle (with red dyed ears) in a pram, and a puppy on a leash.

The first thing I thought was. ‘how do you walk a poodle in a pram?’

And the second thing I thought, after the lady said the puppy was a terrier cross shitzu, was ‘imagine if he was a bulldog cross shitzu!’

We also saw in Toowoomba what I think is the weirdest name for a school – the Holy Name School. I’ve seen an Our Lady Of The Rosary, and an Our Lady Of The Sacred Heart school, but not a Holy Name school!

Our land cruiser doesn't have a CD player, which makes sense, considering that it's 17 years old - older than me! - but it does have a tape player. So now we have all our old tapes out. It's hilarious how many of the songs I remember - I must have listened to then a LOT when I was little!!!

We drove through Dalby, which I, being uneducated in geography, and educated in technology, thought to be spelt ‘Dolby’…

Our next stop was in Chinchilla. We ate lunch and lost Nanny and Pa again. There was a pioneer cemetery across the road from where we stopped. The cemetery was divided into Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican religion sections. All the graves were facing the same way: east. It was really sad that some of the people who died were only eighteen fourteen, or even one years old. There were signs explaining what different crosses, flowers, etc meant on a grave – for example, a broken column means a life cut short, and a celtic cross (cross with a circle) means eternity.

We had lunch at a playground that was about two sizes too small for me. There was a little boat seesaw that Dini, Dominic, Oskar and I crammed into (my knees made me feel like a grasshopper), except with all of us on it it ended up feeling more like a pendulum on steroids than a seesaw… Dini fell off, and when my back end slid off, they kept swinging, so I’ve got a few bruises.

Right now, we’re going through a massively long roadworks section. We had to wait so long to go through, dad ended up turning off the engine! It goes for several kilometres. It’s really funny, because dad has a radio, and when he tuned in, we could hear everything the workers were saying!

Oh, and by the way, we’ve been devouring the anzac cookies – thanks Joy! – and the muffins are up for tonight’s dessert! (thanks the Boyless!!!)

We can’t believe how hard it is to get air for the tyres on the way. Good grief! You’d think there was a pipe shortage! We’ve stopped at at least five different petrol stations and none of them have air!!

Dom was learning about the Noble Gases the other day, and mum said, ‘that’s us!’ Especially since there’s eight of them and eight of us. It doesn’t help that our car runs on gas too…