Nate and Sarah

We arrived back from the UK last Saturday evening and Nate and Sarah arrived with us on Sunday afternoon after a week at a friends wedding in Brisbane and a couple of days relaxing in Byron Bay.  They have a lot of friends in Sydney so spent a whirlwind week catching up with people.  

Tess started back at school on Wednesday sporting her new winter uniform which I personally think is very smart!  There were a few tears to start with but when I picked her up she was full of stories about all the exciting things they'd done in class.  

Jules took Friday off and took Nate and Sarah out on the speed boat for a proper tour of the harbour - they were blessed with a glorious clear sky and took my instructions seriously to get photos of them in front of Sydney icons. They pulled up at Watson's Bay for lunch at Doyles which is really very sophisticated!  

We picked Tess up from school and headed straight up to the Hunter Valley for the weekend.  Jules and I have always been quite disparaging of the Hunter considering it to be over-commercialised.  This time we stayed in a more remote part of the Hunter and discovered some incredible boutique wineries set in the most picturesque countryside.  We were on a mission to make sure Sarah spotted a kangaroo in the wild and by 3pm on Saturday were getting quite anxious but fortunately Jules spotted about 7 in a row so the pressure was off!  We also found (and Nate rescued?!) a long-necked turtle from the middle of the road - he was a bit nervous about picking it up after I told him that the long neck allowed them to bite you!!  

We spent a very successful day wine-tasting on Saturday - Tess and Tom were angels, I was designated driver and Nate, Sarah and Jules did some very serious wine-tasting.  Note the photo of the ready-made family!  We bought vast amounts of wine and headed back to the cottage to stoke up the fire and gorge on delicious food and wine.  We introduced Sarah to the delights of hibiscus flowers in champagne which she was really quite taken with and I became very "David Bailey" taking photos of the glasses!  After dinner we started a game of Cranium which lasted until 2am and allowed us to drink all the wine that we had bought that day (I'm not exaggerating!).  The boys gave up at 2.15 am after an impressive duo charade of "Miss Universe" and Sarah and I stayed up chatting until 4.15 (I'm so glad I can still do that!!).  Tom was up at 7 the next morning but I managed to fob him off with a DVD until about 9 so it was all quite civilised.  We had a huge fry up and given that we were all suffering huge hangovers and sleep deprivation decided to head back to Sydney for a quiet afternoon.  

I hope you enjoy all the photos - it was really hard to choose just a handful to post.  I think it's obvious where Tom got his eyes from!  Now guys, we have no more visitors in the diary for this year so you really need to pull your fingers out - we love having guests!