Merry Christmas and Beyond!

 

Wow, it has been a while!  Here we are in the week between Christmas and New Year's...The last few months have flown by and now we are looking forward to 2014! 



2013 Rappe Family Pic

Christmas in Australia was a little easier the second time, knowing to expect hot weather and to order most gifts online waaay ahead of time.  Even so, Jax had a couple presents that didn't make it in time, so he'll get an extended Christmas whenever those arrive! 
We did manage to have a cloudy/drizzly Chirstmas morning, which is second best to cold and snow.  It makes it feel a little more like Chirstmas when it isn't blazing hot and sunny!  Trent has had the week off from work, so it has been great fun having him home for so long!  In our house, it really is necessary to have Papa here helping put toys together, explain and play all the new games, participate in nerf wars, sword fights, and other various and sundry activities!

Well, our Christmas season started with a program at Church that the kids participated in at the beginning of December.  The main portion of the play was done by older kids, but Jones, Jax and Beaux all went up for a few songs and danced away.  They did a great job! 

We decorated our tree that same weekend at home.  This year the kids hardly needed any help at all with ornaments and knick knacks just finding their way all around the house to the classic tunes of Christmas.  It was pretty fun to watch them decorating with gusto! 

That same night we had the most beautiful orange sunset and a great big rainbow across the sky!  I don't remember ever seeing a rainbow while decorating the tree!!

We had a couple get-togethers with friends for Christmas as well; the most recent was a very involved day of swimming, appetizers and the Christmas story at their home, then packing everyone up and trekking back to our home for Christmas carols (Trent on guitar and their daughter Rebecca on our keyboard), big ham dinner, and a gift exchange.  Everyone had a wonderful time!

Christmas Eve we made sure everything was ready for the next day, of course which includes finishing up our Advent book telling the story of Jesus' birth and the reading of The Night Before Christmas.  Also, the kids each get to open one gift and it is always a huge surprise to find out it is new jammies and slippers!  A cup of milk and some peanutbutter balls were positioned for Santa and we were off to bed.

  The excitement level was off the charts!  I am not sure how much actual sleep the kids got, but they weren't allowed to come out of their rooms until 7 am...Of course they were chomping at the bit when we opened their doors at 6:55 am! 

Stocking exploring and gift opening lasted a good couple hours, with lots of happy faces and smiles and goodwill abounding!  We had cinnamon rolls, bacon and strawberries for breakfast and I believe we snacked on all that until lunchtime. Trent had helped me decide not to have a big feast on Christmas itself, because that way we all got a nice relaxing day...that was a great idea!  We had kindof an Aussie dinner, with meat pies and oven quiches.  Everyone was pleasantly exhausted by the end of the day, and we felt so blessed and grateful for all our wonderful family and friends who love us.  We sure missed being with all our extended family, but this may be the last year of that!

Thursday we took a little trip out bush to a new destination about an hour west of town.  We had to drive for 15 km or so on a pretty rough track, but not the worst we've been on in central Australia!  Destination:  Birthday Waterhole on the Hugh River. 

Of course, the Hugh River is dry like almost all rivers here in the outback, and Birthday Waterhole was just a small pool of green muck, but it was a really pretty location with lots of big red rock and river gums. 

The kids had gotten real! bow and arrow sets for Christmas, so we definitely needed to give them a try...away from the general public.  It was really fun! 


We were shooting into a target box filled with sand, and the kids did really well.  I think their arms get tired pulling the cord back, but that will just take a little time to build muscle. 

The bows worked really well and all three munchkins got some good shots off! 

 

We also brought a couple other outdoor games to play while we were there,

and our new metal detector (no gold nuggets this time, unfortunately). 

It was to be the coolest day after Christmas, but was still in the 90s, so it was pretty warm and the flies were terrible, so we just stayed an hour or two and then were happy to get back in the car for the drive home. 

 

 

 

 

We did not see any kangaroos or camels this time, but we saw dingoes, a long-nosed dragon, and some horses. There were camel tracks down through the sand at Birthday Waterhole, so they must travel through the area sometimes.

 

Long-Nosed Dragon Catching Some Sun

 

Camel Tracks

Dingo Couple

Horse...

Pretty much every waking moment other than our trip to the waterhole has been spent getting to know our new presents and enjoying each other...we made sure not to make a bunch of plans for this time, except just having fun and being together.

It's been a nice time together and the kids are so happy to play and play and not be trapped doing schoolwork!  They probably will get another couple weeks off and then we'll be back to it.  Trent mowed the lawn this morning and our thermometer was reading 120 degrees F...it was in the sun, but you get the idea!  (He survived.)

Today is our feast day (I thought I'd split the difference between Christmas and New Year's Day), so there is a turkey in the oven and the rolls are rising.  Thanks so all of you who have read with us about our adventures Down Under, and blessings on your 2014!

Love,
Hilary

Adventures in Dry Camping

We survived a five day dry camp up at Ruby Gap, and are back to tell the tale! 

Two Room Shower and Toilet Tent

Trent has been collecting necessary items slowly but surely over the past few months:  two room shower/toilet tent, luggable loo (bucket with bags and toilet seat), water filter (to filter waterhole water for showering in), solar heated shower bag, big plastic jugs to haul drinking water from home, some minor adjustments to our trailer to be able to hold the water jugs with correct weight distribution,  a two-shelf zippable pantry with top for keeping the Coleman stove, ropes, stakes that hold in sand, a little fold out picnic table for the kids...you get the idea.  



Our favorite new camp thing is a SwingAway for the firepit!  Love, love, love it.  It looks like a piece of rebar that you pound into the ground next to the fire and has some attachments to hold a steel grill and a huge skillet, and a separate bar across the top to hang a billy or dutch oven or cooking pot from.  Each arm of the SwingAway can be raised or lowered depending on the size of the fire, and also swung easily away from the fire for ease of dealing with food or pots.  It's pretty fun, and hopefully will last forever!  Very Aussie out-bush.

Well, we left last Thursday morning, packed to the gills, and arrived at Ruby Gap just after lunch time.  We stopped on the way and had a bit of a picnic in a riverbed we drove through.  Our favorite camp spot was free and clear, so after Trent played with the winch for awhile...involving snatch straps, several trees, and a very long chain...we got the Disco plus trailer pulled up the sandy hill onto our beautiful riverbank retreat!  










Set up took quite until dinner, and we had to finish cooking our salmon on our Swingaway over the fire in the dark.  Very tasty though!!

Jax lighting the fire (all the kids got a turn!)

The weather while we were there was very hot and the flies were extremely bothersome, so those were the two big negatives of the trip.  It did cool off a bit at night, but we slept with all the windows of the tent open (there was netting) and it was still pretty warm.  Of course, now the kids have fun memories of "sleeping under the stars!"  The stars were just amazing every night.  Jax, Jones and Beaux would lean way back in their camp chairs and look at the Milky Way while they munched their s'mores each night.  

We saw lots of shooting stars, too, so I don't know if there are always that many going on, or if we happened to be camping at a fortuitous time of year!  During the day we tried to stay cool by playing/showering early or late and just sitting about in the shade during the hottest times.  

We brought our canopy which has a net around to keep bugs out.  It provided a nice place to sit around out of the flies when the tent was in full sun and way too hot to be in.  There is a skill to entering a screened area without letting the hundreds of flies that are camped out on your head and back in to the sanctuary...You must unzip the entry only halfway, bend way over, and let the screen scrape the flies off of you as you go in.  Quickly turn and zip up the door before they regroup and land on you again.  Presto!

A little Sudoku for Sis

Jax reading at the picnic table

Jones memorizing his Ninjago Encyclopedia

Luckily, the kids had books and games to occupy them while it was too hot to actually move around.  I must say, however, sitting for hours in those camp chairs is an intense form of torture.  We may have to invest in some better camp furniture; maybe the director type chair would be more comfortable?

We did have a long hike one day to try to find Fox's Grave.  It is an 8 km trek through Ruby Gap, on through Glen Annie Gorge, and then up the river a bit and over a hill...and back.  But we found it!  The story goes that Fox was after rubies at Ruby Gap, but when it came out that they were only garnets, he killed himself.  He has a lovely gravestone chiseled and his grave is all covered with rocks, but it is a little elusive.  We were lucky to find it this time, because Trent looked and looked last time we came and couldn't locate it.  

Heading off for our hike!  The kids call this section "The Rocky Ranges"

We were all so hot and exhausted by the time we got back to camp after this venture!  We didn't do much other hiking this trip with the weather so warm.  The hike through the gorge is so pretty...if it were 40 degrees cooler, we would have just adored it!

Let's see...Food.  Camp food is always an interesting topic.  Our menu is somewhat limited by the foods my family will eat, but we manage.  At least, we do not usually lose weight on a camping trip!!  For dinners we had:  salmon, grilled chicken, pancakes, and hot dogs.  On the side we brought strawberries, homemade applesauce, mac n cheese, muffins, potatoes, eggs, carrots, corn, and bacon.  Lunch was usually tuna or chicken salad sandwiches, or peanut butter/jam with yogurt and fruit...some chips and pretzels may have snuck in there somewhere, too.  Camp coffee, cocoa, oatmeal, cold cereal, and crumpets in the pie iron took care of brekky nicely.  Of course, s'mores made an appearance almost every night.  Our marshmallows melted into one huge conglomeration, so we just detached chunks to roast as needed.  The fruit snacks we brought each melted to a pile of goo, so the boys thought it was pretty funny to peel those out of their little pouches and shove the whole thing in their mouths at once!  Beaux didn't think it was quite as amusing, but she ate hers too.  Notes for next time:  put mallows and fruit snacks in the cooler.  

Here's a trick that did work well for us this time:  we saved 6 plastic milk jugs before we went, washed them out really well and froze them with fresh water leaving room for the ice to expand.  We used these for ice in the cooler, so we didn't have to deal with wet food or draining issues, and when the ice did melt, we could drink nice cold water from the cleaned jugs!  We also bring as much of our food frozen as possible, to keep the cooler as cold as we can for as long as we can.  

Wildlife?  We didn't see too much...lots of birds calling, but it was hard to pinpoint them at Ruby Gap.  Their songs echo off canyon walls and you can't really tell where to look for the birds themselves.  Of course we had the normal wake up call from a crow (which sound much much more horrible in this area than a normal "caw" from a crow back home....more of a hoarse scream of injury).  We did have a visit from a huntsman spider (the really big ones) near the outhouse tent, but Trent torched it, so we're all good.  Every morning we would see the camp just littered with dingo paw prints, but we never heard or saw them in the camp!  We slept with our windows open, and Trent and I woke up a lot, but never heard a dog in camp.  Crazy silent beasts.  They aren't supposed to be scary, more like coyotes in the States than wolves.  In fact, ours were perfect ladies/gentlemen!  Although the prints were as close as a foot away from the tent, they never touched it, or tried to get into our food bins, or messed around with the toilet bags on the ground outside the "bathroom."  One night, as Trent was playing his guitar and we were all singing around the campfire, our song ended and we heard way off in the distance the song of a dingo.  That was really special and fun!  They can't bark, you know.  I believe they communicate with coughs or "singing" which is like a howl.  We decided our camp dingoes were friendly!





Another fun thing we do in the Ruby Gap area is fossick for garnets and other interesting stones.  Craig and Debbie gave Trent a shaker sieve with three different inserts, each varying in hole size for fossicking, so we took that along and had a good time in the river searching for gems!  We never found anything real large, but you can't hardly sieve a scoop without finding some small garnets throughout.  Treasure hunting is fairly addicting...



We came home on Monday afternoon, very happy to return to toilets, showers, and air conditioning, but missing our starry nights, campfire meals, and free days!  It's nice to know we can do the dry camping, but I prefer the camping where the facilities are built in and there are paths to ride bikes on and a lake or river to cool off in...those are the days dreams are made of.

Thanks for tuning in,
Love,
Hilary