NYE was the last day in Oz for my kids – the flight out wasn’t until 2am (yeah, I know..) so we had a full day to have fun.

We drove off to Mandurah for a walk, a play in the park, an explore and a coffee – its only a 30 min drive and its quite pretty on the board-walk.

The kids had loads of fun exploring, looking for fish in the harbour, cleaning up litter (yeah, we have a bunch of conscientious environmentalists on the books) and playing in the park. We went for a longer walk over to the marina which was nice – its looking like its going to be a much nicer version of Hillary’s Boat Harbour (which I hate with a passion) – somewhere I might actually want to hang out. Hopefully they don’t spoil it.

It was a lovely afternoon, really relaxed and a good finish for the kids.

We scooted back to Rockingham to get fish and chips and scoffed them on the foreshore and listened to the NYE entertainment starting up. After a good feed, we had a little play and then headed home to pack 😦

Here are some pics from the day 🙂

Some tearful farewells later, I drove off with Ella and Henry to get the plane back to Singapore and then onto Heathrow.  Its a shame we live so far apart as we had such a lovely time all together.   I get to see them much more often as I’ll fly back to the UK a few times a year, but we simply can’t afford the AU$10k+ it costs to get them all here to Perth or for us to go to the UK en-masse very often.  Ah well..lottery win, where are you?

The trip back was uneventful – its a bloody long way – the kids were shattered by the time we took off and were asleep for a good chunk of the trip.  They were good as gold really given how tired they were and how much they just wanted to either stay or get back depending on how they were feeling.

We picked up the hire car and drove to my mum and dad’s place on New Years Day where their mum and her parents (my ex-wife and ex-inlaws) came to collect them, saving me a 4 hour+ drive there and back.  It felt a bit odd, but we all get on ok and I like my ex-inlaws.

Was sad to see them off cos it was so lovely having Ella and Henry here for 10 days, but I know we’ll manage to do this again sooner rather than later.

After an very short sleep, I was off back to the airport and despite having to change terminals for Malaysian Airlines, I was uneventfully back off to Perth via Kuala Lumpur only 15 hours after I arrived.

Jet lag, what jet lag?

And so ended 2009 and began 2010.