The Great Outlaw Visit of 2009

Tom's mom has come and gone and what a lot we all did!

- The Great Ocean Road (see next post)...Melbourne to Port Campbell and back

- Immigration museum

- St. Patrick's church

- Movida (my favorite restaurant)

- Republica (another favorite)

- Lots more random eating and weight gaining, including polishing off at least half of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup cache Ruth imported for us

- Playing Killer Bunnies, the Beginner Pared Down Version with Ruth, and other German style boardgames that his brother sent for my birthday

- Playing Killer Bunnies, the Hard Core No Mercy Version with our new booster packs that we got Ruth to import for us

- "So You Think You Can Dance" tour concert (confirmed my belief that I cannot, in fact, dance)

- Salvador Dali exhibit (different, unusual, nice)

- Viewing Melbourne from the 360 degree overlook downtown - wish I'd done it sooner and maybe I wouldn't get lost so much?

- Trip to Cairns, Mission Beach, Trinity Beach, Karunda and Dunk Island

- Butterfly park and wildlife reserve

- Attended closing gala at a modelling conference....was duped...no models there at all, nor any high end designers or people with an interest in fashion...turned out to be, like, scientists + buffet.

- Played Roulette, the NON-European table kind (only one "0" for the house) - experienced similar result to usual Roulette (you have to know me pretty well here)

- Watch Ruth win our team a round of red wine playing Heads or Tails (you put your hands on your head or rear end and they flip a coin), then we won "dinner for 6" by getting lowest score of the the night (bag of chicken flavored potato chips, or "crisps" as we call them here)

- Had a lot of good conversations about Tom's family history, upbringing, etc. I decided that we live too far away to not spend our time covering relevant topics. We tried to stay away from chatter about the weather or bask in the glory of just how great being a cub scout was for Tom.

- Met a Cassowary face to face. Just wow.

- Went scuba diving with my OPEN WATER CERTIFIED husband on the Great Barrier Reef. Our last dive was the best of my life. Tom's mask fogged up, his ear hurt a lot and wouldn't pop and he had a myriad of other equipment problems. I was just glad he was there alongside me, in pain though he was...hmmm....sports imitates life?