My written words on a weekend away (device)

Last weekend I travelled to the North Coast to attend my cousin's 60th birthday party. It was held in a penthouse suite in the Pelican Resort in Tugun. Great 360 degree views of the Gold Coast and the neverending beach from the giant, rooftop balcony which even had its own sauna. I was there with two of my sisters and met up with my brother. It turned out to be an even bigger family reunion as my cousin's sisters came along too, travelling from New Zealand. I hadn't even met two of them or if I did I was only a baby the last time we met.

The party (about 40 people) was a mix of Kiwis and Queenslanders mostly. Lots of good food, wine and music. Crazy dancing and some very pathetic attempts at world records.  How many Kiwis can you fit in a sauna?  Eleven apparently.  The penthouse suite's balcony was attached to the upstairs bedroom so when it started raining we all ran inside to see how many Kiwis can fit on a bed. Another eleven apparently.

The photos and videos are hilarious, I may or may not make them public (depending on how drunk I look).

The weekend was pretty damn good. I stayed at my sister's house in Casaurina which is a very good place to get away from a full on job and breathe sea air. She lives in a complex which is an array of units surrounding a huge pool and over the road is a walkway to a very empty beach. Very empty except for the inexplicable line of dozens of dead black gulls washed up on the sand.

The two sisters and I had a Saturday afternoon walk up the windy beach (after a tiring morning getting sunburnt by the pool), in which we discovered a wallaby in the scrub, a rabbit, a few water dragons and one floundering, doomed gull in the surf (we put it up on the grass verge but we could tell it had some sort of brain damage and couldn't sit upright). We almost got wiped out by cyclers on the boardwalk in which one of us (not me) screamed like a banshee. The screamer previously suggested we needed to investigate the scrubland off the boardwalk and after they both clambered over the wire and the gate, indicating that I was soft when I didn't want to do the climb over, I unhooked the gate and asked why didn't they just open it instead? As you can tell, I'm the one with the brains.

We thought that bashing through the bush would be fun until we remembered that it was home to hidden snakes in the leaves, so we scarpered out, over another wire fence just a little way from the end of the fence that we could have walked around. Nothing like making a relaxing walk challenging.

After the party on Saturday night, we recovered from our champagne headaches with brunch at a cafe on Cabarita beach, amongst the kids learning to be Surf Livesavers in hot pink wetsuit vests.  The houses on the beach up the road had my name on them.  I could just imagine living here, my kids getting into the beach culture with sunkissed hair, running around in bare feet.  One day, one day.

That afternoon we cruised the Kingscliff shops and checked a small gallery.  My flight was due to leave 5.40pm (Qld time) but some careless plane in Sydney left bits of its tyres on the runway and it took several hours to clean up, whereby all flights in were delayed.  And so I sat in Coolangatta airport for about four hours. Thankfully I had a new book to read (My Mother, My Father which I blogged about here). At least the wait gave me a chance to actually finish a book.

So that was my weekend - lots of sun, sea, sand and champers.  A million laughs and three sisters with a growing habit of forgetting words for things and substituting long complicated descriptions of those said forgotten things. For example - a sun lounge is a long and low, flatish comfortable sunning device; a glass is a round sturdy drink holding and dispersing device; a car is a big wheeled transporting-of-persons device.

Yes, everything must have device on the end.

And once you start calling those things of which you've forgotten by their device name, you cannot stop.  Try it, I dare you.