The pitfalls of wearing the same type of flip flops all the time (Havianas!)

Oli and Colin left on Wednesday (boo) but still managed to keep themselves busy - they had a few days in Newcastle visiting more friends then on Saturday we all went into the city to see the first day of the Festival events - which, it has to be said, were a bit rubbish - a woman teaching children how to ceilidh dance (we resisted the urge to join in), a stall showing you how to make origami cranes (the bird, not the machinery) and then some bouncy castle-type things which Adam and Emily loved.

One of the bouncy-castle things was sloped that the kids could climb up and then roll down, except part of the structure ripped and a whole load of children all fell into the gap . . . including Adam who was upside down at the bottom!! Colin and another Dad then stood at either end of the gap pulling children out. No-one was hurt but Adam was quite upset about it all - understandably seeing as he had about 10 bigger children falling on top of him!!!!

On Sunday we had a BBQ for about 15 people - should have been a few more but quite a few people dropped out at the last moment - it was good fun and, as ever, we were left with a ton of food!

For their final full day, we all went to the zoo, including Colin W (the whole two Colin thing did get quite confusing at times!), after Oli & Colin had done some shopping and we visited Emily's new nursery - the nursery is literally next door to Adam's school and brand new (it opened on the 7th Jan) and thankfully, appears fabulous.



Before Oli & Colin got their flight, we had one essential tourist site to visit: Harry's Cafe De Wheels for "brunch" of pie, mash and mushy peas - well actually only Colin "pig-bin" Gemmill had one.

Oli & Colin arrived on Sunday (their luggage arrived on Monday) and we nearly killed them by trying to keep them active and showing them some of the main tourist bits in the city.

They have left us already - gone to Brisbane but they are back on Saturday - they were meant to return on Sunday but we are such good hosts they changed their flight.

Thanks to the Royal Mail and their postmen taking offense to being asked to actually work the number of hours they were paid for, Mum and Dad's anniversary card and Dave's piece of Tat took about 3-4 weeks to arrive.

I big thank you to the posties!!!

Anyway, I can now reveal to totally useless piece of authentic Australian rubbish that I sent to Dave as a reward for his astute guesswork.



If you are not sure what it is.....  its a genuine crocodile foot fashioned into a back scratcher.  Told you it was useless tat. There is so much tat to buy I will post another quiz when I think of a good teaser question.

Not so much guess the right answer but give us good suggestions . . . we have been invited to a Halloween party and need suggestions as to what to go as - it is an American who is hosting so it will be a full-on Halloween event!

Dave's winnings from last month will be bought and posted this week (we have been a little side-tracked).

Dave!!

We saw 13 houses but went for house number 9. More Australian tourist tat will be winging its way to Glasgow.

In case you can't tell it is a Cane Toad keyring!!!

How many houses do we view before finding our new (rental) home? ? ?

I will start you off . . . we have seen six so far (two shockingly bad; two averagely bad; one too small and one okay but was rented three days after we saw it)

Had a small shock this afternoon when my colleague came to say that there had been a terrorist attack in Glasgow but forgot to tell me that no-one was hurt - after franticly checking the internet, I found the full story - got to love the BBC website - but I hope I never have to read Glasgow terror attack headlines again.

This is what we did on our holiday: