While Christmas day in Australia was a highlight, it was just one day in week-long relaxing holiday in the country. Well, it was relaxing for me. May not have felt the same way to my Mum and Dad who were busy hosting a revolving door of visitors.

I think I’ve mentioned before that this visit was a special one for me, not just because I was able to spend time with my family, but because it was our first Aussie Christmas since Thomas was just 3 months old. Christmas is an expensive time of the year to travel to Australia – it’s a big holiday that it falls in the middle of Summer which means costly airfares. And, while that makes for an expensive vacation, it also means plenty of opportunities to spend time outside during the most wonderful time of the year. On the flip side, it can also mean plenty of HOT days when all you want to do is hibernate inside the nice cool house and avoid the swarm of flies that seem to appear every time you step out the back door. The other option on a hot day? The pool.

I grew up in a suburb of Melbourne where the local pool was the Summer gathering place to keep the neighborhood kids cool on those hot humid days. Fun fact: the pool in our neighborhood was attached to a Tupperware facility. It was free at certain times of the day and rumor has it that the water was heated as part of the process for cooling the Tupperware plastics. I hear it’s now a gathering place for the neighborhood ducks.

My parents now live in a country town on the Victoria/NSW border and, like a lot of small towns, it also has a neighborhood pool. Unfortunately it is just a little too far of a walk on a hot day with small children and shade was surprisingly hard to come by which is a big no-no in a country that aggressively pushes the “slip slop slap” message thanks to our very own giant hole in the ozone layer. But, lucky for us, my parents have neighbors with a pool and they kindly offered it up for our use while they were out of town over the holiday. The bonus was that we had it all to ourselves and that meant hours of fun.

Ahhhh, the Aussie Summer. There’s nothing else quite like it.

And that completes the first part of our Aussie vacation. Next time I’ll start posting highlights from our trip to Tasmania where we encountered everything from penguins to ghosts and devils to criminals. Back soon.