A Garden Holiday

I’m a little ashamed of how long I’ve been away from blogging.  Even my Thankful Thursday series has not been achieving it’s purpose in getting me to post regularly.  To those who wait for news from me via this blog, I am sorry that I have neglected this.  It has been a busy semester of college and I have either felt too busy to write (or think about what to write), or I haven’t know what to write about.  I know there have been things to write about but I haven’t always known how to write about them.  But we’ve just come off a week of mid-semester holidays and we did something worth writing about so here I am again!

Last week, Monday to Wednesday we went away to the Hunter Valley to get away and spend some more time together.  The Hunter Valley, for those who don’t know, is a famous wine region.  And what’s wine without some fancy food?  So there’s also some fancy cheese factories and other things as well.  I’m not really into wine or fancy cheese (give me cheddar or edam any day) but J and I still found some things to do. 

My favourite was our visit to the Hunter Valley Gardens.  Because it cost us to get in we made a day of it.  The step counter on my phone said I’d done over 15,000 steps by the end of the day! 

The Garden is set up as a number of different gardens together in one park (for example, a rose garden, an oriental garden, a formal garden, and so on).  It was a wonderful time to walk around with J and marvel and God’s creation.  So many colours and varieties and ways of shaping them together.  Here are some photos from our time there. 

I got J to imitate this bush!  We marvelled at how well many of the hedges and bushes were shaped and trimmed.  These were some of my favourites:

There was a storybook garden with lots of figures and stories from nurseries rhymes and other places.  I imagine it was a good garden for children who were bored with the rest of the Garden but I found other places much more interesting.  My favourite part was those funny bushes (above).

We also had fun at the Hunter Valley Garden village, which had lots of cute shops and things to try.  J did some wine tasting and we both had some milk and a cookie from the homemade cookie shop.  One afternoon we bought some cheese and had a little picnic of cheese and crackers and fancy spiced pear paste. 

It was a lovely time away together that I think we both needed.  Now we’re back at college and back into the swing of assignments and lectures.  Please pray for us, that we would still find time together, as we enter this busy time.