Suicidal Bugs, MORE FISH AND CHIPS!? and Childhood Friends...

I hope you guys have noticed that I have been away for a little while.

The third term of school ended last week, and so last Saturday my family and I went camping in Port Gregory. Port Gregory is a fishing town with about thirty people, a caravan park, a General Store with some seriously good fish and chips aand....not much else, all next to a BRIGHT PINK lake (it's called the Pink Lake, how ironic/imaginative) that is about thirty times bigger than the town itself. We took the dogs with us, which means we weren't allowed in to quite a few places, unless one of us stayed with the dogs - but I swear, my dogs are better behaved than your kids.

And so...I lived in a tent for four nights. We drove to Kalbarri. Our front windscreen became the final resting place of about three zillion suicidal flies who landed splat on the windscreen. We adapted my favourite card game, Uno, so that we could play it with normal cards, and we ate waaay too much fish and chips.

In Kalbarri we ran into one of my classmates from primary school, and his mother. I have known this boy since we were about five or six years old - and in my mind he's always a little blond boy, the only popular kid who ever bothered to be nice to me, the one that all the girls started drooling over the day we all turned nine (I won't say if I was one of them.)

But man he has changed. He's always been taller than me, but now he's even taller than my dad, who is nearly six foot. His voice is so low it's a bit like talking to Darth Vader. He's more man than boy, which clashes with my mental image of him - a couple of months ago I ran into another former classmate, and he had shot up too, complete with the Darth Vader voice. But, he's still the same guy. We had a little chat and he met my baby Bella, who is now exhausted (although all she ever did on the trip was sleep) and fast asleep on a pile of dirty laundry.

Oh, and I went horse riding! Like, proper cantering, on my own horse, on a trail ride. Only I was stuck behind this really slow horse so my horse was 'fast trotting' instead of 'cantering' - cantering sounds scarier but actually the fast trot is scariest because your feet fall out of the stirrups and you're bouncing up and down like a jackhammer and I nearly fell off.

Do I like the country? Yes. Could I live there? No. I haven't lived in the country since I was two years old, and two years of infancy is not really enough to turn one into a proper country girl. Although I have often dreamed of living on a ranch and owning horses and riding every day, I know now that it would probably have to be part of my English dream - the outback in Australia is wild and rustic and beautiful, but also sweltering hot and full of flies and mosquitos, something I notice is wonderfully absent in cooler climates. And, also, I'm a YouTube fiend of the highest order. I'm a lipstick and eyebrow-pencil kind of girl. I'm the kind of kid who needs fast internet and air conditioned shopping malls and I'm not afraid or ashamed of the fact. I'm a city girl who happens to like the country. I love going camping with my family, I love experiencing things that I don't get to experience in my normal every day schoolgirl life. But I'm always relieved when I get back.

At the moment I'm blogging (obviously) with a horseback-riding-induced backache and very sore legs. My face, which was breaking out epically during my trip, has welcomed my return to my Body Shop skincare products with open arms. I smell of pinetarsol because I had to take a pinetarsol bath for all the damn mosquito bites that now decorate my ankles and legs. I'm tired, in pain, but happy, so happy.