Its a beautiful day

The morning sun over our paddock

This morning was my first day off after bit of a stint.  I've been working live a slave (self-imposed rather than having a whip-cracking boss over me, though we do have whip cracking on the property on a daily basis - but more for guests).  In the last week I think I've not so much saluted the sun as asked it to meet me later for coffee.

We had the wedding expo in Brisbane this weekend and for the first time ever, a bridal expo left me cold.  It wasn't so much the same old people exhibiting or the thousands of people all looking for the same thing, or even the 14 year old child-bride models.  It wasn't the fact that we had to wear oh so sexy fluro yellow vests to set up and pack down, or even the disastrous day we had on Friday in getting there (it poured- open trailer - two haybales...). Nor was it even that we spent the whole weekend across from a diamond stand and I saw nothing I liked. But its all over now, like a bad dream.

Today was a blissful day, full of purpose.  Last week I got cranky because I have nothing especial to look forward to, and on a random errand in Toowoomba, we stopped in at the travel agency and started to seriously consider our next holiday.

Today, armed with all of our propaganda, full of astericks for the places we really liked, we brought a couple of lonely planet guides and set off for lunch.  We studied our guides and wrote our lists, and then fortified, went back to the travel agent to get quotes.

I felt like the biggest snob.  The agent immediately started to work out the cheapest deal, the family friendly 4 star resort full of crowds of people and pools and water sports that active people like to enjoy. He suggested a 5 day all inclusive tour, on a bus. He recommended that we cut out the most interesting city of the three that we wanted to visit beacuse it is expensive to get there.

I found myself asking the agent to look for hotels that were less child friendly, insisting on the fancy beach hotel on stilts over water because it looked nice in the picture (even though it is probably far above our price range).  I also had to explain that we weren't looking for a trekking holiday and when he suggested a train, all I was concerned about was whether it was rickerty and Michael asked whether its the kind of train that people sit on the roof.  We put our foots down - no bus tours (at least the kind that are more than half a day loing). We have become so old before our years, we should be embracing hostels and backpacks and mud and the best deal possible, but all we could think of was comfort and doing as little as possible.  Is this so wrong?

As it turns out, the places we are looking to go have a pretty good exchange rate at the moment, and the fancy hotel on stilts is cheaper than where we work now because they are in the middle of their soft opening (which means that you are guinea pigs). We are pretty excited about the prospect of the trip and I have already started thinking of titles for my travel book (Michael finally bought me Microsoft Word so that I can start writing my award winning novel that will fund this overseas adventure).