A day in the big Smoke of Wagga Wagga

Today we decided to spend the day in Wagga Wagga (pronouced Wogga) checking out the shops. It was a bit rainy here and with half the house full of pre/teen girls Abigail suggested the mall would be a great place to kill some time.

Wagga is about an 1hr 20mins away from Tumut and felt like quite a long way to go to visit the mall but distances like that are very normal to travel for one appointment in the next town. The Brinkmans do this trip once a week or fortnight to hang out with other local homeschoolers. Yesterday at Abigail's church I met a young couple who traveled 5 hours alternately every week to each other's home church to spend time together!
The road to Wagga was beautiful - all browns, oranges and muted greens. The landscape doesn't change much from hour to hour as every now and then when I looked up from my knitting it was more of the same - lovely rolling hills with brown summer shaded grass, big sporadic gum trees and a few horses. I wonder if people make a living from the land out here much? There was the odd crop of something I didn't recognize, a few sheep and a herd of horses every now and then, but otherwise such an endless vista of rolling land. I find it fascinating that looking to the west in my minds eye that the land I'm seeing will literally go on and on for weeks in that direction. Unlike New Zealand where I know it will reach sea soon enough. Somehow I find the endless expanse of Australia somewhat overwhelming.
Drive to Wagga



Wagga hosts two malls, an animal park and an 'Aldi' (among many other things of course) which is a very cheap supermarket type shop that they have in Holland. This was our first stop of the day where we stocked up on the family's favourite chocolate and giant jars of olives and gherkins. I also found a box of 10 individual icecreams that was only $2.80 which I thought was pretty awesome.
Our Aldi shop
Lovely Auntie gave each of our girls some Australian dollars to go wild in the shops so the mall was a hit for them all. Some just buying a few sweets and saving the rest but others getting a cool t-shirt and drawing books.

Our other plan of the day was to go to the botanical gardens and to visit the little animal farm they have there but sadly we missed out on the daylight saving closing hours so we had fun in the playground instead and played tag in the rose garden to burn some energy after just wondering around the shops and eating crisps all day. This was probably the boys' (Josh is very much included here) best part of the day as shopping was really an act of love towards all us girls and was done with gracious acceptance of a day not spent quite how they would have liked it.

Tonight almost everyone is snuggled up in the lounge watching the second of the Hobbit movies after we watched the first one last night. Our two families together are huge Lord of the Rings fans (though only to the extent of watching them- not dressing up or anything super fanatic like that! Hehe) and together Abigail and Dennis and Josh and I have seen the movies many times. So now we are starting up a tradition of watching the Hobbit trilogy with the kids. I'd better go and join in!


We almost all fitted on!

Noa, Fern, Lois, Davida, Ezra, Phoebe, Seth, Salome and Esmae

Ezra and Noa playing a game on the deck this morning



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