(Christmas Day)
We treated ourselves to a lie in (until 7.30am) and had a dehydrated cooked breakfast - it looked like mush but tasted delicious. We opened our little presents from family - a Christmas shirt each, a Christmas hair tie for me and a bow tie for Luke which made for a brilliant photo, and then we opened secret santas from above the fire place.
Luke got a model stunt plane and some tea bags, Renee got a battery operated iFart Shuffle (fart noise machine), and I got the 'who am I' game.
It wasn't quite like being at home but it was so lovey being in our own little hut, laughing and treating ourselves to a nice breakfast with a few small gifts - it was a shame we didn't get to spend it with the others we'd hiked with too but spending the day with Renee was lovely since she's been such a big part of our trip up to now.
We didn't end up leaving the hut until about 9.30 which was optimistic since the 'easy walk' we'd planned for Christmas Day actually turned out to start with a 700m climb; almost 400m of which were within the first 1km.
Our Christmas tops didn't smell like New for long... it was cloudy but so so humid that we were sweating so much by the top that we were soaked through. It was a touch start but listening to the A Spaceman Came Travelling and the Band Aid Christmas songs on our way to the trig point made it slightly easier!
Despite being stinky and sweaty and ready for lunch, when we got to the top, the first thing we did was check our phones...we had signal!!!! We had a really quick lunch and then hung around to text home and watch the video of Rosanna wishing me happy Christmas in her angel outfit about 10,000 times (best thing ever!!!)
Hearing from home when we didn't think we would on Christmas Day was so good - while it did make us miss the usual chaos of Christmas at home even more, it also made both mine and Luke's day.
Spirits high, we made our way back down from the trig point via the surprisingly nice path and followed it for some time until we hit the swing bridge that took us into the car park.
We had originally planned to stop somewhere near the car park but when we arrived, not only did we have loads of time, there wasn't the greatest selection of places to pitch a tent either.
We contemplated a sand fly ridden field off the side of the road but soon decided to push on to the village hall a further 6km away.
It was all road from the car park to the hall and we walked past house after house listening to people playing games in the garden and children running around playing - I think we all started to miss home at Christmas at that point.
Despite deliberately slowing down each time we passed a driveway, nobody had invited us in for Christmas Day tea by the time we reached the hall so the hall was as good as it got! There was no water taps or anything so we cheekily crossed the road and disturbed the opposite families game of Christmas frisby and asked to fill our bottles. They were more than happy for us to fill the bottles but again, to our disappointment, no invitations for Christmas cake and tea!
We finally gave up on our hopes for a magical Christmas Day invitation and settled for the hall. We pitched our tent... or almost pitched our tent before realising there were three big holes in the bottle of it!!! With literally no idea of how they got there, Luke and I had lost all Christmas spirit and grumpily debated about how best to fix the tent with glue that takes 12hours to dry.
We patched it up (we found another hole in the process so there were four holes in total) and used Renee's rain skirt to go underneath us over night to hopefully keep any rain out- thank you AGAIN, Renee!
A much needed Twinings tea, and a big dinner later, we were a little less grumpy and decided to get the secret Santa gifts out.
Luke put together his stunt plane and launched it around on the grass outside the hall. It came with a little elastic band that you could use to catapult it. On his third or fourth go he managed a loop-de-loop and got a bit cocky. He had one more go and all three of us watched the plane fly onto the village hall roof- one secret Santa down!
Oh- Renee's iFart Shuffle, that we'd put batteries in that very morning, ran out of battery before we'd even hit camp so that was actually two secret santas down!
The 'who am I' game was the only one left - basically, you used a dry wipe marker to write something or someone on the top of a pair of glasses and then the person wearing them had to ask questions to find out who they were. I was by far the best player at a record guess time of only 35seconds!
We played a few rounds and cheered each other up a bit before deciding it was probably time for bed... so we squeezed into our teeny non-waterproof tent and hoped for the best- Happy Christmas!
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