Chinchilla

After a pretty good night's sleep for me and not a great one for dear hubby (kids kept him up but I can sleep through most things it seems) we woke to another beautiful HOT day and headed across the road from the motel for the usual travel breaky of McDonalds. Little Miss R always calls it Old McDonalds and both kids get very excited when we go here because it's such a rare treat.

So after fuelling up on hotcakes, hash browns and orange juice (for kids) and coffee (for Mum and Dad) we set off on an hours drive across the downs past cotton and sorghum fields to the town of Chinchilla. It's the end of the bi-annual Melon festival today so things were really beginning to wind down after what seemed to be a pretty big night.

Our first stop was the park of course as it was still early enough and not too disgustingly hot for the kids to play. I hope it was because of the festival that the park was pretty dirty and that it's not like that all the time as it was a bit feral in some places I can tell you. At least the play areas were pretty clean and very well covered which was great.

Then it was driving ALL around town for a couple of hours looking at houses and blocks of land.

As we're looking at living here we're keeping our options open but we did get a pretty good feel of the place today. Not many of the houses for sale really appealed so it looks like we may be buying a block of land and building a house. The above two blocks are just some of the options available

By 1pm we were ready to find somewhere to just stop for awhile and went to a local motel where we were lucky and able to check in straight away. So it was off to our room amongst the beautiful grounds of the Great Western Motel (above) where we enjoyed the air conditioning and a not very restful afternoon. The kids were a little bit hyperactive after being in the car for so long and being confined to a small space in the motel room was not a good idea.

After letting a bit of the afternoon pass, we eventually decided that 2.30pm was a good time to get in the pool. It was shaded by the trees by then so that helped our decision and it was one of the best decisions we've made all weekend. The pool was BEAUTIFUL and we all stayed in there for well over an hour having some lovely family time. As it was early in the arvo and no one else had really checked in yet, we had the place to ourselves which was an even better bonus.

Then it was time to sit on the little verandah ourside our room to have some snacks/dinner. It's been a bit of a different day so it didn't matter if we were having a bit of a different evening and it was really lovely having some family time outside for awhile.

I do say for awhile because things didn't stay that way. I got bitten by some sort of ant on the instep of my left foot while playing hide and seek in the beautiful gardens with my kids. It's still hurting hours later but I'm not too worried about it anymore because while I was taking some photos of the gardens, the kids were running and playing then Master M face planted into the cement. The below photo is the result and doesn't seem to look as bad in the photo as it really looks.

So it's been a bit of an over-tired and very sore evening for one little man. I also find that at 7pm both my kids and my husband are asleep and I'm sitting in a relatively dark motel room wondering what to do?