Melbourne wet & wonderful

Spring is here and a huge hurray for that. I really don’t enjoy the winter with short days and wet weather making it difficult to get outside and into the garden. And, I couldn’t believe it when my editor told me it was time for this month’s column. Honestly, I felt as if it was only a couple of weeks since I wrote the last one.

This month we’ve a done a few exciting (different) things. We headed over to Melbourne with our Waiau Pa friends and met up with others who flew in from Perth. It took them longer to reach Melbourne than we took from little old New Zealand. Although the weather wasn’t particularly kind to us, the company was fabulous and we all had many laughs which made the trip special.

This time, we girls were accompanied by our respective husbands and that put a completely different light on what we opted to do. Usually the shops would have been our focus but with husbands in tow we decided on the last full day to take a ferry and cruise down the Yarra to Port Philip Bay.

We left the boat in the picturesque suburb of Williamstown. I must say we all loved the old town which still has all the old shops and on a sunny day it would have looked stunning. As it wasn’t sunny, but pouring with rain, we found an old pub and settled in until the ferry returned to take us back to Melbourne.

When we arrived home, after just a few days away, that spring feeling was in the air and the promise of summer on its way – it really cheered us.

This past month also brought Father’s Day and the daughters decided that one would cook a leg of lamb at our place and the other daughter would bring the roast vege salad. Great! Brian and I were both so miserable with the flu that no food shopping had been done but no worries; the girls had it under control…. wrong.

The son, who has moved to Tauranga, arrived with his fiancée to surprise the father and thought that the girls were organising lunch. Then the Hamilton son arrived with the same plan to surprise the father. All well and good, but there was no food in the house and the leg of lamb was still in Howick and nowhere near an oven.

The day worsened when the Howick daughter and husband didn’t arrive with raw lamb until 2.30 pm. The lamb was promptly put in the oven just as the Puke daughter arrived with the salad. Then Elton rang to say he and Stuart might pop in as they had some cake left over from the cafe (Kaos).

The out of town families left and headed first (we think) to MacDonalds – we sat down to our late lunch at 5.30pm. Families!

The other Monday my Pilates class mates decided we would have a girlie night out and go to the movies in Puke’. This is always so nice as our Friday class is a mix of ages. More often than not, I am the oldest but they don’t make me feel old which is great.

With our instructor, Jo, in tow we went to the movies early then after we had eaten icecreams and all manner of ‘not the best for your health’ things we went on to enjoy tapas at Alfronso’s. What a lovely night we had.

Now, it’s roll on summer.

Reay Neben is a Franklin resident and publisher of Rural Living.