Happy Birthday Eilish, The Family Van, Sweetheart and the bombing of Darwin

Well in a short time there is plenty to report.  Eilish even celebrated a birthday today!  Firstly and mainly we are all safely now on Melville Island.  We are well and the family trip is travelling along nicely.  Family? What family I hear you ask?  Well we were having trouble gelling as a group and then along came the ..... Family Van.

Suddenly we felt just like a family!  Highlights so far have included - standing on the spot where a bomb landed on Darwin in February of 1942, travelling to the Tiwi Islands aboard the Arafura Pearl, visiting the Northern Territory Museum with incredible Indigenous art, Sweetheart the Crocodile and the Cyclone Tracey experience.  The wall really did shake!

We won't mentione the cold showers Mark organised - but we can mention watching the sunset over the water as we dined at the trailer-boat club in Darwin.  We became intimately acquainted with our new home away from home - 'the troopie'.  We found a new way to do grocery shopping - collecting it from a plane and then finding what is ours and we revelled in the beauty of a very special waterhole.

Tomorrow brings the Nguiu Catholic Primary School fete with the serving of cappucinos to very happy Hawthorn fans.  Yes we are now well and truly in AFL country!

We spent a little time today in the Nguiu community.  As part of this we visited the Pwanga Women's co-operative.  This clotmaterial printing and design  business has been running for over forty years with the backbone being local strong Tiwi women.

After two five o'clock starts tomorrow we sleep in until... 7 am!!  Woo Hoo

Until we blog again!