Another busy weekend has passed and today we have reached our 6 month travelling mark. Its crazy to think that half our time travelling has already passed, very quickly we might add! At least we have another great 6 months to look forward!

Monday night we put up the Christmas decorations which was great fun and started to make me feel a bit Christmassy! I even had the honour of putting the angel on top of the Christmas tree. The kids then totally set Andrew up by hiding the camcorder in the Christmas tree and filming us all dancing around to music like complete idiots, the results were very funny!

Wednesday night we met up with Jane Dennis who I was in University with and played rugby with, she is currently living in Melbourne and loving it. We met for dinner and then went to a film premiere of a very low budget and very arty NZ film. Jane had got free tickets and it was a good chance to check out the Nova Cinema on Lygon Street which is a really cute little cinema. The film was ok, not the best and it was bizarre because everyone in the audience were laughing out loud at things that were really not that funny, it was like canned laughter! It was a great night though and really good to catch up after so long.

Thursday night Andrew had free Christmas drinks at a party put on by Hays Recruitment Consultancies. Needless to say he made the most of it and as a result fell asleep on the last train home, missed his stop and ended up at the end of the line! I had a phone call at about 1.30am informing me where he was, my response was 'what do you want me to do about it?' so he had to get a taxi back! Luckily there were two other people who had done the same thing so they were able to share the cost of the cab!

This weekend we ventured out of Melbourne and drove directly north for 3 hours to the Victoria/New South Wales border. It was a road trip consisting of us, Caroline and Hugh (a Canadian guy who works with Andrew at Bayside City Council).

Caroline had to go up for the weekend to work, she has designed a computer program for the ski-race club that race on Lake Charm, near Swan Hill, so while she was working we did some sight-seeing. We are very grateful to Caroline for taking us up there and sharing her motel room in Kerang with us all!

Saturday we went to The Port of Echuca for the day, which is on the Murray River, the closest point the river gets to Melbourne. In 1853 ex-convict Harry Hopwood founded the town which became the busiest in-land port in Australia where in its peak it was over 1km long and over 100 paddle steamers would journey along the Murray River to Echuca to unload their goods of wool, seed, etc onto steam trains which were then taken to Melbourne and then shipped all over the world!

At the moment the river is very low due to the drought Australia is suffering with, however in the past it has been really high and they mark out the levels it has reached. Caroline used to live in Echuca and can remember a time when you would step off the top of the wharf straight onto the paddle steamer, we had to go down several flights of stairs to get on!

They have kept The Port of Echuca and the wharf in its old fashioned form, you feel like you completely step back in time! We had a great day wandering around the wharf, looking in the shops and tasting port and fudge. We had a ride on a paddle steamer up and down the river with the paddle steamer entirely to ourselves and so we even had a go at steering!

It was a scorching hot day and when we got back to Kerang we took a much needed dip in the motel's swimming pool which was really refreshing!

Sunday we had a very lazy day sitting by the side of Lake Charm, watching the ski-racing, reading, snoozing and generally not doing very much - bliss!

We hope everyone is well and getting ready for Christmas, only 2 weeks to go! Thank you to those that have sent us Christmas Cards, a very nice and unexpected surprise!

Lots of Love

Sarah and Andrew xxx