Thursday 26 September 2013 – Dawn goes to school!

What a day!!  Early start today – I woke at 6 and went to the toilet, so I was up!  We had a pretty rough night last night – quite a bit of rain and some strong gusts of wind, but that was just a gentle breaking in for the remainder of the day.  From about 6.30 am it bucketed down, and by a quarter to eight I decided I had to run the gauntlet to the shower and just get wet.

As today I had a professional development day for my celebrancy (held at the Bellevue on the Lake, which according to Google maps is only 400mtrs from here), my plan was to walk around, but as conditions were so bad, Grant drove me there.  He intended going fishing for the better part of the day, but when he left me that looked highly unlikely.

My day went well: caught up with a few celebrants I have met at other PD days, and the course was run by a very nice tutor with a good sense of humour.  She was from Brisbane and wasn’t at all impressed with the weather.  Our topics for today were – some of the legalities about ceremonies and who can legally marry, the value of social networking such as Facebook in getting your name out there as a celebrant, and writing a blessing for a couple.

At morning tea time there was a massive downpour, complete with hailstones and strong winds, and at lunchtime it was still raging.  When Grant picked me up at about twenty to three he said he had spent most of the day dashing in and out of the van re-hammering in pegs (which anchor our flies) which were constantly pulling out of the ground in the gale force winds.  He had gone over to Eastern Beach in one short break in the weather, as he thought it was clearing, but was soon chased back to the shelter of the van.

Once back in the van we had some afternoon tea, expecting any time to hear the canvas on the upper half of our van rip – the wind was scary.  And we were still experiencing torrential downpours pretty constantly.

We’re now sitting down after tea and being buffeted by the gusts of wind which are still battering our van, random heavy showers of rain, heater going full bore and just hoping that it all abates by the time we wake up in the morning. As tomorrow is the last full day of our holiday it would be nice to finish it with some sunshine, but I’m not very hopeful.  I think Grant’s highlight for today was the fact that he could buy a Melbourne paper – the first in almost seven weeks, so that gave him something to do today.  And I suppose I was at least inside out of the weather all day in a nicely heated conference room, so I got the better deal of the day.

Victoria has certainly turned on a memorable ‘welcome back’ for us.