Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Sydney roadtrip part 1, Melbourne to Gladesville
31 October - 1 November, 2009

For the Melbourne Cup long weekend - a four day event here in Victoria, if you time your leave right - we decided to completely skip anything to do with racing, and indeed anything to do with Melbourne. We drove up to Sydney to see friends and family, and came back the slow way down the coast road.

First stop: Euroa. We timed our leaving home to put the Spud in the car at about the time she was ready for a morning nap, and she happily slept for about the same time as it took her parents to get hungry for second breakfast. And to need petrol.

There was a Lions Park next to the roadhouse, and we set the tone of the trip right from the start by going and kicking around on the grass for a while, cooling down and watching the leaves and getting plenty of out-of-car time. And all having food, too.

This is at Holbrook (we have a lot of photos of relatively anonymous parks :-). We stopped in Wodonga (which always seems like a nice little town right there on the Murray River and the Hume Dam) for bakery and a driver change, then drove on to Holbrook. We had planned to go further, but that was where the Spud got restless and hungry. Holbrook is the Town of Submarines (altitude 120 m), and I did look carefully in the stream in this nice park but I didn't see any. They were all at the park down the road. It had gotten pretty warm by now - a 30-ish degree day to begin with, and then we drove inland. This was the start of the first extended warm patch Sparrow has encountered (I only got out my first short(er) skirt a few days before!), and we were combining it with her first multiple-day roadtrip with long days in the car. Aren't we ambitious. Luckily, our plan basically involved taking extra time on top of the extra time to get anywhere, and stopping any time she needed it. That was a good plan, because that's exactly what we did.

Here was the first of the planned "we must stop here" stops. The Dog on the Tuckerbox, at Gundagai. It took us a couple of goes to find it, as there are several Gundagai exits off the freeway. And in fact, it's not down any of them. It is, as the poem says, "five miles from Gundagai", which is the first freeway exit north of the town. If either of us had remembered that instead of singing "There's a track leading back to an old fashioned shack" on repeat or admiring the really really long bridge over the Murrumbidgee River flood plain, we might have saved ourselves some confusion. The silly thing is that, while it's James and Sparrow's first visit, it's my second or third - and I made the same mistake the first time I went looking for it. You'd think I would have known this time round.

After the photos it was thrash time. Put a blanket on the ground and let her wiggle any way she likes. Most often it was her current favourite new thing: to grab her feet in her hands. We organised ourselves some dinner while she wiggled and kicked, then we started to get back in the car. But no, she'd prepared a little surprise for us. That lovely yellow nappy that you can see is our experiment for this trip (because we are even more ambitious than you thought we were). Sparrow is wearing a flushable nappy. Because it's entirely flushable, it's not waterproof, so you have to put them in a cover (which is what the yellow thing is). We thought this would be more convenient than cloth and nicer than normal disposables for the trip. Unfortunately, we found out a few minutes after this photo was taken that while the cover is very good at sealing everything in, the absorbent nappy pad itself won't catch all of a long gurgling liquid poop as it's not designed to seal in any way. So if she poops, the cover gets dirty and needs to be changed and set aside for washing. This is about seven hours into a four day trip, and we have brought with us one proper cover, plus two "they should work all right" spares. For most of October Sparrow had only been pooping once every couple of days, and always when out of the nappy and on the change mat. Then we planned something that made use of those facts... Every day of our trip she pooped three times, always large and liquid and wide-spreading and always when wearing the nappy cover. The flushable nappies worked really well, they were quite convenient and easy to handle. But we ran out of covers after the first day and a half.

We had decided to drive only as far as Goulburn for the night, and that was a good guess. We got in at about 7 (as we'd predicted), and found our way to Mandelson's of Goulburn. Being Halloween, Saturday night, Melbourne Cup weekend and there being a large sports car festival in town, this had been the last place we'd found a room in when looking online. To our surprise it turned out to be not a motel but a historic guesthouse, on the site of the first hut ever built in Goulburn. It had been a hotel of one type or another for most of its life, currently in the beautifully renovated form you see here. We took a walk around Goulburn to stretch our legs in the evening, then slept, and in the morning Sparrow and I got up early to take lots of photos of her in the gorgeous surroundings. Which was part of wearing her out ready for the next drive, in theory, but really I just couldn't resist. This photo is in the communal lounge. There is a symphony playing very softly in the background, and a crystal decanter of complimentary port on the sideboard.

On the table in the dining part of the communal kitchen. They had silver platters with lace doilies, and I tried getting her to sit on one of those because people are always saying they could eat her right up, but she's not really able to sit stably on her own yet so that didn't work. But she matched the china teapot really well. James was new to the idea of guesthouses or hostels that have comprehensive but communal facilities like this. I found it more familiar, but I must say I've never been in one quite so elegantly done.

Chillin' on the lon-GEW, dudes and dudettes. And why yes, that IS a marble staircase with dark wood balustrades behind me, why do you ask?

In the reception / office room of the guesthouse, which had a Victorian silk dress on display along with some marvellous old furniture. (I am presuming Victorian as most everything else was intimating that era, and I'm sure I've seen pictures of Queen Victoria in apparel of a similar style.) I thought I was being very clever to get a photo of both her and me in our pretty dresses, but it took several goes as I needed a long exposure and she couldn't fight gravity for very long :-) James helped with this photo - he's standing just out of shot, in case she topples right over.

Goulburn is sheep farming country, and this is the Big Merino. It's right opposite a fairly nice bakery where we grabbed breakfast, just at the entry back onto the freeway to Sydney. I don't think that Sparrow had any ability to perceive the thing, though - from her point of view I suspect it looks just like a large wall. She hasn't seen sheep yet so would have nothing to associate it to even if she could see the detail. Eeriely enough, as I was trying to take a photo of something her size with something that size (not easy!), I discovered that the merino's head is partly hollow, and at this hour of the morning if you stand in front of it the sun comes through and makes the eyes glow.

That's right, cute it up at me. This is an unplanned but demanded stop in Campbelltown. Goulburn is close enough to Sydney that we thought she'd sleep the whole drive through to our first visit, another twenty minutes down the road, but no - she woke early, did a massive poop and requested we deal with it. Campbelltown was a nice place to pull off the freeway, stop in a park, and get her cleaned up. I am taking this photo while James is at the Woolworths next to the park buying disposable nappies, as we're now on our last cover.

Sparrow meets Henry and Charlotte. We've made it to Gladesville.

It had gotten pretty warm by noon when we arrived, and Sparrow was happy to be out of the capsule. Here she is on the floor surrounded by proffered toys. However, she has decided that the thing she wishes to hold determinedly and occasionally gnaw on is Daddy's hat. (The toys are probably relieved.)

Sparrow and Kylie. We are visiting Alex, who is James' cousin (the only one he has in this country). He is from Germany, and met his wife Kylie when she was visiting as an exchange student. They now live here in Sydney, and Kylie runs a travel and tours business for Germans visiting Australia.

That's Alex in the background, barbequeing lunch. Henry and Charlotte are trying to decide whether or not to head back into the pool.

Lunch won, but they were back in the pool afterwards. Even Sparrow had a go. She thought the big blue bathtub was interesting, though she gave me a funny look when I showed it to her and said "Badewanne!". The sort of look that says "Are you *sure*?".

She wasn't entirely sure about being dipped into it, either. But it wasn't bad, just... perplexing.

Serious conversation with some-degree-of-cousin Alex. How do you work out those relationships again? I'm buggered if I can keep it straight.

All together on the couch: Alex, James, Sparrow, Kylie, Charlotte, Henry. A last photo before we left them to their peaceful and warm sunny Sunday afternoon and drove on to Dave and Catherine's.