Family celebrations...

Last Friday most of the family headed off to Wandoan. We all had an engagement party to go to on Saturday night...what a wonderful excuse for the family to gather together. 

Two different cars but staying in touch through Facebook! Lol

Wandoan is a 6 hour drive from Brisbane, so we had a few breaks...

First stop was in Toowoomba at the Visitors Centre. Every year at this time, Toowoomba hosts the Carnival of Flowers, but with the 6 hour drive to Wandoan facing us, we knew there wasn't time to go around all the garden displays.  But the Info Centre had some lovely gardens for us to admire...

Because of the influx of visitors for the Carnival, the public toilets at the Info Centre were supplemented by a cute little temporary toilet block...

The next stop was in Dalby, where we lunched at the Coffee Club. 

The mid afternoon stop was in Chinchilla...

In recent years this pretty town has been flooded a few times, but was nice and dry at this time! 😉

Next stop was Wandoan, the town where DsD1 teaches.

5pm on a Friday and not much was happening...

We headed to the motel which was the meeting point for the weary travellers...but only DH, myself and our sister in law were actually staying at the motel.

As each carload arrived at the motel, the facilities of our room came in very handy for everyone.

DsD1 and her fiancé Dan live 60 km away on a cattle property and they came into town to pick up a few items and to lend DH and I one of their four wheel drive vehicles...

You see, some of that 60km of road to the farm is gravel and there are many parts where cars have to ford water...'Carlotta Camry' would not be able to do the drive safely.

So we used this car to do the 120km round trip on both Friday night and Saturday...nice and high off the ground. ( mind you, it was filthy with mud when we'd finished using it!) 

So when baby was fed and changed our convoy of 4 vehicles set out on the 60km drive for our family dinner on the Friday night.

DsD1 had asked everyone to bring something for the meal. She mentioned that she would provide spaghetti, so I offered to make a batch of my pasta sauce. Apparently she was expecting 27 of us to be having dinner together, so it was a rather large batch that I took. 

My little granddaughter had some of the sauce...

She ate the whole bowl full! 

It was quite cold outside; nevertheless most of the family moved outside...

In the photo above, we are actually sitting around a fire pit but we were still cold. Eventually DH, our SiL and I took our leave ready to drive the 60km back to town. We left the others to bed down in their tents or swags on the floor, on the property. More about our 'country break' in later posts.