NSW Trip Day 14: Newcastle

The rain had started again and didn’t let up all day, so we were looking for indoor or sheltered options for an outing. We took it easy in the morning, and at 11.30 I rang a trampolining place P had told me about – they said we could bounce at the 12pm session and everything else was booked out. So we quickly got ready and made it to Springloaded by just after 12. The kids jumped and bounced for about 45 minutes – it was great. There was an area with a floor made of little tramps that they could jump around on (and tramps on the walls to bounce off as well), and a similar area that was also a dodgeball arena, long tramps that they could run or bounce along and then jump or flip into a foam pit, and larger tramps to jump high and do tricks.

From there we decided to make our regular trip to Blackbutt – a nature reserve, with Australian animals, in the middle of the Newcastle suburbs. Tony dropped me and the kids off and went and got fish and chips for lunch, while we went and saw the wombat, rock wallabies, koalas (including a quite active juvenile who was climbing around his tree eating gum leaves), and lots of birds and frogs and lizards. Once our food arrived we ate under the shelter at the new playground, and the kids braved the rain to have a play on the excellent equipment – particular a rock climbing hill and a rope to help climb up and down the (steep) hill.

I had dry clothes in the car today – the other 2 times the kids have gotten wet on this trip I didn’t have spares with me – so they got changed and then we picked R up from his house (the guy we had dinner with on Wed night) and I dropped Tony and R off at the pub. The rest of us came back to Marks Point and the kids played with their cousins for a couple of hours until they went out to a Thermomix Party. The kids and I relaxed downstairs, watching TV and reading, then later Millie and I went in to town to pick Tony up from a pub at the foreshore, where he’d been catching up with some old friends from baseball (a few guys who were at our wedding 11 years ago and we hadn’t seen them since then – as we moved away straight after we were married). Back home and I went straight to bed, Tony and the kids played for a bit longer.