Early in the week, I met up with Ian Richardson who served part of his mission in Hervey Bay. He is from the Melbourne area, but now is living in Sydney. We met for lunch and enjoyed a yummy meal at the local hotel. It was nice to catch up with Ian and we are looking forward to meeting up with him and his girlfriend for supper next week.
I spent more time at the archives with Rosie again this week gathering more information about our family history - the information which I have collected can be used as sources for information which I have gathered previously. When I get home to HB, I want to put all of the information I have into the Family Tree program so that I can see what else I need to work on.
Dad has been asked to go to PNG (Papua New Guinea) for three weeks starting next Monday and I will not be joining him. I want to use that time to work on my family history. I am hoping to take a week of that time and go to Wagga to get some information re: family history from Auntie Norma. I want to go through all of her papers she has and also to talk with her about growing up in Wagga (I want to use this info to try and write Poppy's life story).
I also went to the State Library this week and copied some newspaper articles about my ancestors onto a USB stick. It is so awesome to read about them in the papers - back in the late 1800s and early 1900s there wasn't much news to report, I guess, and so it's interesting to see what they considered news. For instance, a wedding announcement of my ancestors was put in the newspaper and in the annoucement, who gave what gifts was listed (one of which was four handkerchiefs). :-)
On Friday, I met up with my cousin, Robbie - he is Rosie and Cheryl's younger brother - and he lives quite close to where we are staying. Cheryl had suggested I call him to see if he would like to get together with me. Since I don't know Robbie that well, I didn't really say anything to Cheryl about it. She went ahead and called him and asked him if he would like to get together with me and he said 'yes'. So, I called him to make a time when we could both get together. He picked me up at the hotel just after 10am and we went up to a local mall where I thought we would have lunch and that would be it. We chatted for a while, had lunch, and then he wanted to do some grocery shopping. We took the groceries back to his place, chatted some more and then he drove me to a beach for another chat and then to a different beach for another chat. He dropped me off at home just after 6:30pm. I was so surprised that he wanted to spend the whole day with me - Robbie is a very private person who seems to prefer to be on his own - I thought it was very nice that he wanted to spend so much time with me. We chatted about all sorts of things including some memories of life in Wagga when we were young - it was a good day. (Robbie doesn't do photos, so I don't have any of him for the blog).
Saturday, Cheryl organized a get together with her family, her friend's family, Rosie's family, and Dad and I.at a local park. Everybody brought something for the luncheon (we brought crackers, cheese and dip) - other things brought were: spinach dip in a bread bowl, egg sandwiches, meatballs, fruit salad, quiches and cake. We really enjoyed visiting with everyone in a very relaxed atmosphere. After lunch, we went for a quick trip to see Cheryl's place and then on to see Becky and Sean's new house. We visited more at Becky's - long enough for it to be supper time - and so Rosie suggested we go to a Chinese restaurant to eat - Becky and her sons, Joshua (7) and Liam (4) joined us. It was such a delicious meal and I am disappointed that I forgot to bring our camera to the restaurant. Fortunately, there was enough food leftover for us to have tonight for dinner - mmmmmmmmmm. :-)
After church today, Dad and I went over to Manly - do you girls remember going there - that's where Aunt Janet used to live. It has a beautiful beach there and we walked for more than two hours along it. Around 4pm, all of a sudden, the sky got very black very fast. We couldn't believe how fast the clouds came in! It started raining, bucketing actually, and so Dad and I walked very quickly to the main street where we could get under cover. We walked up and down the main street looking in the windows of the shops and finally ended up at the wharf where we could catch the ferry. We shared an iced chocolate and a piece of black forest cake before waiting in the line for over half an hour to get onto the ferry - believe it or not, 950 people can fit on a ferry and we still had to wait for two ferries to depart before we could get on the one which took us back to Sydney. It was a really nice day overall - and our last day of sightseeing before heading back to HB.
Sydney buildings as we left the wharf
Sydney Opera House
Sailboats in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Manly Beach
