St Helens Saturday & Sunday

Sunday, 8 January 2023

Yesterday was the Sprint race of the Oceania championships, I arrived at the start line a bit worn out after a big shop at Bunnings for garden supplies and an even bigger woolworths shop for food for St Helens (there's a supermarket here but it is noticeably more expensive than woolies or coles). While I shopped the kids had early start times so they ran their races and both did fine.  Jon and I started at almost the same time much later and finished at about the same time - I won my class while he was third after a biggish mistake at the start he did well to bounce back from.

Then we did another shop at Officeworks and Kmart on our way home for cables and kitchen equipment and arrived home in St Helens for a late birthday dinner of nachos for Kari.  Luckily we had time to make the cake in the morning or it would have been midnight by the time we ate it!

Today we had the practise event for tomorrow's long distance championships (not my favourite distance!). We went out to the event but didn't run - just to chat with RobPs lovely wife who was out here visiting some of the places Rob had visited when he was here mapping the area in 2019.

After that we revisited the shell dump to collect more shells for my new mini gabion basket seats:

In the afternoon I took Paul and the kids to try out the paddle boards for the first time. It was pretty choppy so they only inflated one of them, and didn't do much stand-up paddle-boarding - mostly sit-down paddle boarding.  Their tumbles were spectacular and it was hilarious to watch.

I wanted to get home to start planting some of the plants that Paul brought up for us, so I was delighted to discover Jon's sister in law Terri had been put to work on the task when we drove up (no-one gets away scott free if they visit us):

The garden is looking fantastic if I do say so myself. There's more to go, so no - 'after' photos quite yet but we're really making  huge progress and I love it.