Rest and relaxation

Since I am a Bad Mother, I hadn't organised a family holiday for January until December. My requirements were fairly simple:

Within 4 hours' drive

Less than $1500 for the accommodation

Access to a swimming pool

Access to a beach as well would have been a bonus, just because we have spent very little time at the beach with our kids. However, with a 14 month old, the world wasn't going to end if I couldn't manage that.

Of course, anyone who has kids older than mine is smirking knowingly at this point. "She wanted to organise a family holiday for January in December? Yeah right, that needs to be done by March! Not to mention that ridiculous budget - maybe a weekend in January!"

Everything I looked at was around the $2k for a week mark, and none of it was available anyway. I was just starting to think that we would never have another holiday for less than $5000 now that we are restricted to school holidays, when I figured I'd look at the pricing for a 2 bedroom cottage in the Hunter Valley. I had been hoping for a more kid friendly destination, but we had fun last year - so why not at least look.

Thank the gods wine regions are not family friendly - $750 for 5 nights, with an indoor pool, putt putt golf, tennis court and 9 hole golf course on site. Breakfast hamper supplied so we didn't have to do much shopping the first day.

So here we are. The boys are all in the pool for the 3rd time since we arrived yesterday afternoon. A second round of putt putt golf with follow. We've been to 2 wineries; an old favourite and one we've never been to before. The latter offered to take the kids into the vines to taste grapes that are nearly reading for harvest if we want to come back on Friday morning. All being well, I think we'll take them up on that offer.

The only downer is that McDonalds is the only Internet access - and they block all port 25, so I have to reconfigure my mail server to accept SSL or suffer with webmail. I ran out of battery before I could do that today, so I will sort it out tomorrow (when this will get itself posted). When I run the world, all accommodation will have access to the Interwebs.