A Convention of Gnomes

Wednesday January 26th was Australia Day.  A day where the Aussie flag runs rampant.  People are geared up and proud to be Australian.  What do we Americans do?  Get the van and get out of the city!  Not that we were trying to avoid this holiday at all, just happy that Australia gave Devon a free day off in the middle of the week so the Gifford's can have another 'adventure'.

The plan was to go to the Blue Mountain.  A 2 hour drive west of the city.  It all started out fabulously with a random stop in a small town called Glenbrook.  Seriously, we had to stop - it was the annual GNOME CONVENTION for goodness sakes.

It was insanely hot that day so Devon naturally had to get a slushy to share with Isla.

 It wasn't all about gnomes either!!  There was a pipe and drum band, and a dog show, and pony rides and Thomas the Train rides and tons of vendors selling all sorts of kitschy trinkety things.  I was giddy with excitement.  I know, I'm totally lame, but I get a kick out of this stuff.  I'm definitely my mother's daughter (love you mom).

And dad, there were all these woodworkers, and also a couple of guys trying to sell their photo book all about TRAINS.

Then on to the 'gnome walk'.  A trail of nothing but people's collection of gnomes.  Oh the hobbies people have...

After we had our fill of gnomes, we ventured further into the blue mountains.  HOWEVER, we were feeling good so decided to keep going further to check out the jenolan caves.  The 2 hour drive turned out to be a 4 hour drive.  I think the kids would have preferred the shorter version.  I love prefacing a sentence like this 'I love my kids but...' holy cow can Andrew scream.  And wowzer can Isla be a pest to her brothers.  And last but not least: Gross, Ian's vomit stinks.  Oh, and so does Isla's!  But we made it to the caves, with the windows down, and some vile smelling children.

We weren't able to actually explore the caves due to time constraints, and also it would have been near impossible to bring the monster pram up and down hundreds of steps.  So we just wandered around the area.  It was nice and cool there anyway and we were still able to see some fun things.

Paths to the cave enterances

Drew and Ian spelunking 

Trying to get away from me per usual

A cave!

And then a 4 hour drive back home.  Looking back at it, it was tough but very memorable.  Who drives 8 hours with 3 kids to spend time at a Gnome convention and to view the ENTRANCE of some fabulous caves we can't even explore.  That would be the Gifford family.  But hey, at least we're not sitting at home wasting the day away!  :)