Catching up with old friends

This morning started reasonably early. I had to be up and at the bus stop before 9am so I had a quick breakfast with Ross before he walked with me in the rain up to Barrack Street. It was raining so hard that Ross and I had to stop off at the newsagent to buy a couple of dodgy umbrellas.

I didn’t have to wait long until the bus came and I was on my way to Morley bus station for my connecting bus. On the way we passed through Dianella where Ross and I first lived when we moved to Perth. It was funny being back there after so many years. It was great to see the Sizzler was still there – many bottles of Houghton’s White Burgundy were drunk over a meal there!

At Morley I waited about 15 minutes for my connecting bus to Ellenbrook. The bus took about 50 minutes to get out to my friend Lisa’s place (we went to Uni together). I walked for about 10 minutes once I got off the bus. At Lisa’s place I met Alita for the first time (she’s now 11 months) and saw Ashlee for the first time since she was about a week old – now she is almost 3!

We spent the morning just hanging out being entertained by the girls and catching up over a cup of tea. We were going to drive up to the Chocolate Factory in the Swan Valley for lunch. It took a while to get the girls organized but eventually we were on our way. It was a beautiful day and so a lot of people were out and about making the most of the school holidays. We managed to find a table and enjoyed our lunch with Alita while Ashlee slept soundly for most of the time.

Of course being a chocolate factory, I had to buy some of the local product so $50 later I walked away with a block of Cookies and Cream, Chocolate Chili and Dark Choc Mint chocolate as well as two types of fudge – caramel and Irish cream. My excuse for buying all this was that it was for our road trip (although it didn’t take long to break into).

After a nice lunch, we headed back to Lisa’s place and it was about time for me to catch the bus back to Perth so she dropped me off at the bus stop and I said goodbye to the girls. The trip back was uneventful and I read my book for most of the way.

It was about 3 when I got back into the city and I met Ross back at the hotel. After dropping my stuff off, we headed out to buy some supplies for the road trip. We returned to the hotel stocked up and hungry so we walked around the corner to King’s Street Café for dinner. Although we were just looking for something casual, we ended up with an amazing meal of gourmet pizza and great wine by the glass to match. Being on holidays, we felt justified in sharing a dessert so we had a slice of flourless orange cake with two glasses of dessert wine to finish off the meal – yum!

Back at the hotel we packed our stuff up ready for leaving in the morning. We watched the cricket for a while before we fell into bed.