MWNews 68

We went camping this past weekend. Three days. Kind of a dress rehearsal for our ten day adventure we are planning for Christmas. And before we go into the camping at Christmas questions, this is something that Australians do during the holidays. They go camping, or vacationing. Since almost everyone in Australia gets a minimum of four weeks vacation, or leave time as they call it here, the holidays if pretty much when all the companies shutdown and everyone goes somewhere. I think it is a relic of the past when the government or work ethic mandated that everything shutdown during the holidays. Certain days, everything was required to be closed. Only esential services were allowed to be open, like petrol stations and some public services.
These days, I don't think it is mandated anymore. Only Christmas day is a 'you must not be open' day. And that is apparently changing. It is only recently that shops and stores were allowed to be open on Sunday's, but that is the norm now, at least in most of the country. Some places still remain closed on Sundays.
You have to also remember that up until about 40 years ago, Texas had the same type of thing, where you could not buy certain items on Sunday and there was actually no liquour by the drink available. I have no idea what that means, but I am told it was a big deal. So it is not all that far-fetched for Australia to just now be catching up with the whole retail frenzy.
There are still not a lot of places open 24 hours. Only some McDonalds drive-thrus and a couple of places in the city, but for the most part, everything is closed by midnight and most of the shops actually close at 5 on the weekdays and 4 on weekends. That is 5 and 4 in the afternoon. Most states have a late night shopping day. In New South Wales, it is thursday, but I think it is Wednesday in Tasmania and Quensland. I know it difers from state to state.
The main reason for the late night, and I am talking staying open to 9 pm, is that it is when the government checks come out. All the pensioners and all the govenment payments come out on Thursday, so the shops stay open to take advantage of all the people who now have money. Centerlink, the government welfare department, used to come out at the same time, but now, most of the payments, you can request what day it comes out on, so it is not as big a factor in the late night shopping days.
Not sure how I wandered off into that topic from the camping start to this entry. Might have been a good reason for it, but I can't recall what it was.
The kids loved the camping, but they always do. A lot of people tell me the kids are always getting bored when they go camping, but ours apparently are not old enough for that yet. They are still actively going everywhere the whole time. Most of the time, they are doing something they should not be doing, so we spend out time yelling at the kids to stop what they are currently up to, but at least they are doing something and not sitting around waiting for us.
Being on the beach kind of helps also. It was suppossed to be cold when we went and we were staying right on the beach, or just on the cliff above it, so we did not expect to be near the water very often. But it turned out to be ok and the kids spent hours digging in the sand.
The first day started ok but after the sun went down, the wind picked up and we worried about the tent blowing away the whole night. We have to cover the tent with a tarp to make sure it does not leak when it rains but the tarp came loose fairly early in the night and spent the rest of the time flapping and making a lot of noise so no one could sleep. At about 4 in the morning, I got up and took it down. The wind had sort of died at that point and I could do it by myself but it picked up again later and was really blowing for a while.
After that, I thought we were in for a bad time and we considered moving camp to a differnt spot, away from the edge of the beach. We did not really consider it a lot as we spent neraly four hours setting up camp and did not want to undo it and start again, but if the wind had kept up, we might not have had a choice.
Later, on the second day, after the wind had died down, it started to rain. Not a lot of rain, but enought so the kids could not stay outside for long. That kept up most of the night. We had driven into town earlier, so the kids had some adventures, but at camp, we spent the time playing games and trying to keep the kids from knocking things over.
Hate to cut this short, but it is near time for me to be picked up from work, so I have to go. Maybe I will finish it when I get home, but we know the download speed problem with dialup, so I might have to put it off until Monday.
Anyway, have to go. Juanita and the kids are probably waiting out front.
Until next time,
Talk to you later