Parents Day 5

Tuesday

Another cold day and we couldn’t get the chill off, but we were stirred into action and eager to plan the rest of the trip. We spent most of the morning consulting tour books, searching online, and comparing flight prices, before I headed to Bondi Junction for some necessary shopping. I had seen these awesome yellow vintage pots a few days before and figured it was time to separate my poor smothered snake plant from its neighbor, an enormous two-foot-square squash vine. In fact, this viney lump began as a few tiny beansprout-looking stowaways in the snake plant, which once I got them home, started to morph and then I noticed that thin eager creepers were sneaking all over the bathroom and wrapping themselves around my earrings and creams and trying to slip climbers up the towels and in the process slowly swallowing important parts of the bathroom, like the faucet and the hand towel and the windowsill and my toothpaste tube. Which made using my bathroom a very delicate process. Anyway, the squash was actually really irritating me at first and I planned to kill it when I transplanted the snake plant, but then one day I woke up and the squash had put out a teensy yellow flower that was winking at me from behind my deodorant. Since then it has been flowering like a maniac. So I bought two nice pots, and on the way back, I spotted a travel agency. Me and my pots stepped in and asked for some quick advice. Three hours later—after some racing back and forth to the house and phone calls and credit card disasters and insurance worries and hey who really wants to go to the rainforest, well I don’t if you don’t, can we go snorkeling instead, I want to see birds, I don’t want to go snorkeling, are these refundable, which airline, how lousy is the hotel, do we get free breakfast—anyway after all of that, we were the proud owners of three tickets to Cairns!

Exhausted from our acquisitional adventures, we walked the rest of the way to Bondi Junction, checked out Borders, bought some mangos, and were relieved to feel a little bit of sun for the first time in days.