If you have read my first ever post about Mother’s Day in Australia, you will know that we celebrate it the second Sunday in May along with over 70 other countries around the world. The UK isn’t one of them, they have Mother’s Day on the fourth Sunday in lent, usually in March sometime, along with just Ireland and Nigeria.
So, it’s not us.
This year we found a new barbecue spot to celebrate the day, Mount Glorious. We chose to take the long scenic route, a circular drive around D’Aguilar National Park.
For an interactive you, visit Google.
This route took us past Lake Wivenhoe on the east side, we went to the west of it on Father’s Day a few years ago. Here’s the shallow end…
We saw some stunning views of Lake Wivenhoe along the way, unfortunately we didn’t see anywhere safe to stop to take photographs on the narrow road. By the time we reached the first lookout, we were a long way from the dam…
As the sign on this lookout stated, what you can see from here is “only a small glistening section of an enormous body of water“. More on that later.
A few families had already gathered here, with their mothers of course, and were already tucking into their barbecues.
We continued on our journey to Mount Glorious until we found our barbecue spot…
There were two barbecues next to each other, one was already being used, but the other one was available.
Perfect.
No gas up here, so the kids went off to gather wood. As we’d planned ahead, we had newspaper and matches in the car.
Now then, where were those matches? Ah, we’d forgotten the matches.
Fortunately, the guy using the barbecue on the left when we arrived was just finishing up and heard us bickering about whose fault it was we had no matches. “I’m just finishing up here, you can take over my barbecue if you like?”
And before you knew it, we were cooking.
First the sausages…
Then adding tomatoes…
Until eventually we had pork sausages, vegetarian sausages, tomatoes, eggs, bacon, hummus and mushrooms all cooked and keeping warm in silver foil whilst we waited for the beans to heat up.
Beans, that was my idea. And the brown sauce…
Two very proud mums, three happy kids, and me…
Barbecuing outdoors; it’s what Australia was made for.
The journey home completed a great day out for everyone, and there was just one more chance to look at Lake Wivenhoe from a distance. You can just about see it from this lookout…
Well, you should be able to see it, there is a lot of water down there. I did say I would get back to that, so here’s a little fact about Lake Wivenhoe for you.
As we all know, large bodies of water are always measured in terms of ‘Olympic size swimming pools‘. Well, Lake Wivenhoe can hold twice as much water as Sydney Harbour, that’s 1.2 million Olympic size swimming pools.
There, if ever you asked that one in a pub quiz, you can thank me for knowing the answer.
