BARB'S 60TH BIRTHDAY...

No photo of Boxing Day..
We had a girls shopping day for Boxing Day.  Now these can be fun if you do them in Regional Towns, but in Brisbane it was chaos,  parking was a nightmare and the shops were crowded.  However, we did brave it for a few hours.  Willow was super excited about coming with us..
Steve, Dan and Max went to play Arcade games instead.  Colin started out joining them also but got an urgent call into work, so he had to leave...

The following morning, Dan and Chloe were taking off to head to Rocky to spend a week with Dan' folks, whilst Steve and I were heading to the Sunshine Coast to have a few days with my Dad and to also go and have lunch with my very good friend Barb to celebrate her 60th...

We left around 9am so as to arrive at Barb and John's place in Maleny around 11am...
Well it didn't quite happen like that at all.  It was somewhere between 12.30pm and 1pm before we arrived.....

 The traffic was crazy... bumper to bumper from Nudgee to the Steve Irwin Way turnoff.
Often we were at a stand still and most times traveling between 20 and 40km per hour...
Fortunate that we left when we did.  A couple of others who were coming for lunch left after us.  One couple got there around 2pm and the other couple missed lunch as they didn't arrive until after 3pm all because of the traffic..  

It was horrendous on both sides of the highway.  We later found out that the Woodstock Music Festival started that day also so that would have been why there was so much traffic on the road...

We did get to Barb's in time for lunch and what we had a great time.  It wasn't a big luncheon mostly relatives, Barb's sister Pam and her partner, her children and grandchildren, her nephew and his wife from New York, and one of John's cousins and his wife and then just a couple of close friends like us. 

Barb and I

time to blow out the candles on her cake...

Austin helping Barb blow out her candles..

 Barb was very fortunte that both her children could be home for her celebrate this milestone birthday with her.  Jess was able to swap a couple of shifts at the hospital in Tassie to be there.   Even her nephew and his wife were over from New York to visit his mum Pam (Barb's sister) so it was a great opportunity to get some photos of them all together...

Famiily

And then of course we had to have our photo taken together also...  Her grand daughter Bronte was wanting to know about my kids.  So I had to show her pictures of my grandchildren.  Bronte and Willow have had play dates together in the past, but they were too young to remember

 Whilst we were having lunch,  Roger noticed a neighborly sticky beak looking over the fence....
He pointed it out to us all and what a surprise or should I say a SHOCK... I have never seen one as big as this and he was just sitting on the top of the fence...

 He was massive,  thick and over 6m long... Enormous.  Well the kid were a bit concerned and worried then that it might come into Barb and John's yard and come into their house.  Pam's partner Pat went out and gently nudged it and encouraged it to drop back over the other side of the fence...
Still it was the talk and fascination of the kids for the rest of the afternoon. 

Most of the others had left by 4pm which just left a couple of us left.  We probably stayed another hour before heading down onto the Sunshine Coast where we were staying for the next couple of nights to visit my Dad...

We had a lovely couple of days with Dad, not doing a huge amount... We did go out for lunch on the Saturday to meet my sister Lea  and we went to church with Dad on the Sunday before leaving to head back to Brissie.

He is such a dear man, who has a very generous heart,  probably a little too generous at times, but he came back from the shops with these for me....

 We decided to leave straight from church on Sunday morning (around 10.45am) to head back to Brisbane as we did not want to get caught up in crazy traffic trying to get back.
Fortunately for us, we had a good run through to Redcliffe..