Rainy Day Woman

We have our first visitor to our new home.

Caroline flew from Sydney Friday night for the weekend. We were excited to see her and excited to show off some of the highlights of our new home. We planned a full weekend - up early to go to Salamanca Markets on Saturday with some sightseeing afterwards, a drive to Mt Nelson and maybe a walk along Kingston Beach. Knowing how high the chances were that we would all need a little recovery time on Sunday morning, we planned on a late-ish breakfast with Bloody Marys and home-made corned beef hash and then stop off at one of the seafood restaurants on Sullivans Cove on the way to the airport that night.

Then the rain started. And it never stopped.

Since we moved here, we've had rain clouds pass by several times but there has never been a day when we were socked in and never had bouts of sunshine. And certainly not two straight days. Until Caroline arrived for the weekend.

All Saturday morning one or the other of us would look out the window and proclaim that the rain was letting up. "It's getting better. I can almost see the beach," one of us would say. And the other two would look, shake our heads and say, "Actually, it looks worse than it was half an hour ago."

We did some quick schedule shifts. It was fairly easy to bring the Bloody Marys and corned beef hash forward a day as we decided to wait a while to see if the monsoon would let up so we could tackle the markets without wearing flippers on our feet. But as time passed, it was evident that we could either shop for vegetables in cold, driving rain or spend a comfy afternoon inside.

That didn't stop one or the other of us from occasionally suggesting it wasn't too late to go, until Caroline finally declared it was time to stop debating and either go or commit to staying home. We stayed.

In the quiet of the house on Sunday morning, all I could hear was rain. By mid-morning, the weather was more showers than torrential downpours, so we grabbed our chance to show Caroline a bit of what was out there. The tide was in, the breakers were big and the rain was just cold enough that we all decided looking at Kingston Beach from the car was enough of a nature trek for us. Then we drove into Hobart ten minutes away and did a bit more of a car tour for our visitor. We showed her several places we would have gone to if it hadn't been raining. She didn't seem impressed.

We stopped at Mure's for lunch and decided after that to go back home since it was wet and cold and no one felt like doing anything else outside. Neither of them even smiled when I pointed out that we would probably have the Botanical Gardens all to ourselves in this weather.

LK and I had wanted to show off our new home, and we both ended up acting as if we were somehow responsible for the lousy weather. We kept explaining to Caroline that the weather down here really hasn't been this bad, that in fact Hobart averages only half the rainfall of Sydney each year, et cetera, et cetera. We stopped at the point where Caroline said to us, "You're beginning to sound just like people from Melbourne. They're always saying 'You should have been here yesterday' or 'Tomorrow's going to be glorious', but they never seem to have a good day when you're visiting them."

Caroline flew back to Sydney Sunday night, and, as you would expect, we have had glorious sunny, warm days ever since. I sent her a text message on her mobile: "Oh! Why am I squinting? Why is the water all sparkly? What's happening?"

She replied fairly quickly: "Oh, so rubbing salt in the wound is the way you're going. Good to know : )"

I hope that over time she comes to realize that we really didn't have anything to do with the lousy weather.