James' in the UK

Believe it or not although we had only been in England 3 1/2 months, we again endured the 24 hour flights (30 hours total travel time) to spend 2 weeks in Australia. We had 2 weddings on consecutive weekends so we used the one trip back offered by Adrians work to go to them. Well one of the weddings was my brothers so there is no way I would have missed it.

We flew into Adelaide on Friday morning and the first wedding was on the Saturday night. We knew it would be best to try and stay awake as much as possible on Friday so that we'd at least be conscious on Saturday night. I had bought a dress back from England to wear and assumed the shoes I needed to wear with them were is the house at Prospect........I looked around and there were no shoes. I must have got organised and put them in the container before we left, and I wasn't going to be able to go up to the farm before the next day. This meant I had 2 weddings to go to and no shoes to wear.

So purely in the interest of staying awake, I spend some of the day shopping. I found a pair of shoes for each wedding and even found some other shoes I liked the look of. After that Mum and Dad had arrived so we got them to keep us awake for the afternoon and we went to the markets for tea.

The first wedding was my cousin Kelly's. I was really dissappointed when I thought I was going to miss this because I was overseas, but when Brad's wedding we scheduled and we knew we'd be coming back in time it was all OK. The wedding was beautiful, Kelly and Brett looked so happy together and very happy to be getting married. I was roped in last minute to man the video camera which unfortunately meant I didn't get to take any photos during the ceremony.

The reception was great, the setting at Hazelmere Homestead was really nice. Adrian and I felt so appreciated for getting to the wedding, Kelly was genuinely happy to see us there.

We were staying in a cottage on the grounds of the homestead. and the room we stayed in seemed OK but there seemed in general to be a very big rodent problem. Kirsty and Mark found a dead mouse in there bed and Mum and Dad's bedding smelt like mice really badly. There were other people paying to sleep on the floor and they slept in their car because the mice were so bad. There was a BBQ breakfast the next morning and Adrian and I almost slept through it entirely, mum came to wake us up before the food ran out.

In the week between the weddings me spent a couple days up on the farm visiting family and getting some stuff out of the container. Simone and Richard told us they were expecting another baby, so we are going to have a new neice or nephew!

Other than visiting friends during the week, Adrian also spent a bit of time in at work so he didn't have to take the whole 2 weeks as leave.

Coming up close to Brad and Sara-Kates wedding Mum and Dad seemed like they had a lot of work to do down at Myponga getting stuff ready. They went down during the week and got to work. I went down Friday night to do some bits and pieces before heading out for tea, and we headed down early on Saturday to help out.

The wedding was so beautiful, very Australian. They set up a marque down near a billabong on Sara-Kates parents property. There were all sorts of decorations like some sheep (?), an arch to walk through and a signing table. All up it was an excellent night, a lot of work and I'm glad it wasn't me doing the work but a great night. It made Adrian and I realise just how much of the work for our wedding we had done ourselves and we were so glad that we didn't organise something that involved all our family working for days before, on the day, and a couple days after. It was important to us that everyone could relax and enjoy our day and this confirmed to us that we did the right thing for us.

We spend the next few days doing bits and pieces around Adelaide before catching our plane back to Scotland