Team Canada

For the past week the Onemilebridge guest wing has been occupied by a Canadian family, friends of ours who have stayed with us several times before.  Before they arrived, the youngest member requested a regional specialty that he remembered from his last visit: frog in the pond. This delicacy consists of a chocolate frog set in a bowl of green jelly (or as he calls it, jello). We, of course, obliged, and he informed us it was every bit as good as he remembered. Phew!

I guess that was a taste of things to come and their visit seems to have centred largely on food: sitting around the table, eating too much, talking and laughing. 

We have explored coffee shops,

and picked sour cherries. 

We spent a sticky afternoon pitting the cherries, which I then made into sour cherry jam. 

Readers of this blog may remember this is my all time favourite jam, with its sweet taste undercut by sour. Yum!

Christmas morning we exchanged small gifts.

Instead of a cloth I dressed the table with butchers paper, which the children decorated while the meal was cooking.

After lunch we drove to Alum Cliffs to admire Mother Nature's Christmas decorations. She didn't let us down.

One day we called in at Habitat Plants to have morning tea on our friends Herbert and Sally's new deck.

Mark found time to paint a little.

But the highlight probably has been a visit to our friends, Iris and James, to meet two wombats they are caring for. 

Bindi is only four months old, still on four feeds a day, still living inside the house. She was orphaned when her mother was run over and killed by a motorist.

Ben is a little over a year old now. he'll be coming to Onemilebridge at the end of the summer. As you can see he's getting to be quite a big boy.

Our guests are on their way down to Hobart now. They'll be back here next week for the last few days of their time in Tasmania.