16 September 2015 - We've been to Melbourne and back!

Well here we are - we've been to Melbourne and back - and have had a wonderful family time together! It had nothing to do with hospitals or recovery, but everything to do with family celebrations.
This is a bit of a quick sampler of the past few days... 

First let me say the weather was superb - it amply accommodated our desire for an outdoors brunch on Saturday, let alone a pleasant 'late in the day' wedding. 
Brian and I stayed with Geoff (brother) and Robin, and this worked very well as their house has been adapted to some degree to also accommodate Robin's paraplegic brother Steve. How easy is that for us! 

Geoff and Robin

The bride and groom - Amy and Brian - planned a quite informal wedding all at the one venue, and we were able to enter into the spirit of celebration with great ease.

Amy and Brian

Amy made such a beautiful bride!

Sisters - Imogen and Amy

Parents of the bride - my sister Jeanie and Pete.

By chance, the wedding date coincided with my birthday entry into senior citizenship! What a sweet bride to add a (gluten free) cake to the celebrations (observed by my sister Marlene and David). I doubt that anyone wanted too much of the top of the cake after Mrs 'Fatty-cheeks' had had a good splutter over the candles!!

 

 Somehow on Sunday Brian and I managed to get to the early Box Hill worship service, and we appreciated this very much, not only because we have been appreciating the prayerful support from this church community, but because we also met some unexpected people after church - including a friend from Primary School days at Warrayure!!! (I won't say how far back that goes!) 
We were then able to to relax at Geoff & Robin's place, spending time with their family and also Simon and Caitlin. Thanks everyone!

 

Monday morning saw us packing up and heading back home to Portland after a lovely family time together. As we headed towards Geelong the temperature went up to highly pleasant 29 degrees, and our major stop-over was to begin exploring wheelchairs at a warehouse at Grovedale. We were happy to be able to refine our search very quickly to just 1-2 'self-propelled' models, and refrained from making any purchases until we had also visited a Warrnambool warehouse further down the track. This confirmed our research, and a new (red!) wheelchair will be delivered shortly.

Just to make our home journey a little more interesting, the closer we got to home, the cooler the temperature - until it had dropped to 13 degrees with more than a few spots of rain... when clatter, clatter, clatter... yep - we had a flat tyre - and I mean flat. So out into the rain came my (old) wheelchair, and  the spare tyre, and Brian very ably managed to change the tyre which fortunately was not too 'seized' up. It later emerged that a drill bit had pierced the tyre and we have had to replace the tyre itself. It's been many years since we've had to make a change such as this and Brian can't remember when he last had to change a tyre that wasn't just a slow leak.  

 
However, in no way did this spoil the weekend itself, and we have such lovely memories of special family times together.