Monday, November 19, 2012

a weekend away with some new friends. by 9pm on friday night, I'd caught a plane, a couple of taxis and then driven a couple of hours to a farm stay in the hunter. it was a slightly unusual gathering in that I'd only met six of the ten people who I'd be spending the weekend with, in a timber themed farm stay with no mobile reception.

my job is unusual in the sense that my colleagues are scattered around regional new south wales. we chat every week on the phone but we rarely get the opportunity to meet up in person, which is a shame because we really like each other and come from such diverse backgrounds, both personal and professional.

a couple of months ago we hatched a plan to meet up somewhere in new south wales. it was a bit of a pipe dream at first, it would mean lots of driving for some, flights for others, juggling kids and coordinating time off but we pulled it off and I'm so happy that we made it happen.

we spent the weekend hanging out and cooking for each other. it was so relaxing and lovely. I feel so lucky to have such awesome colleagues that I want to be friends with! 

we ate incredibly well. the property was fairly isolated so a big shop was done and for the rest of the weekend we feasted on burgers, homemade pizza (that was my contribution - I even made the tomato sauce for the base), haloumi wraps, french toast and so so many desserts. on the last night we had super rich cheesecake, a freshly made banoffee pie (one guy ingeniously whipped cream with the top of a coffee plunger given the absence of a whisk) and a piping hot apple and rhubarb crumble.

there was a 5cm wide space beside the window in the kitchen where you could get one bar of mobile reception. there were also peacocks, ponies, eels, cows, bulls, dogs and alpacas. we each brought a regional food specialty to share - one guy brought litres of special milk, which had cream was caked around the opening of each bottle. I couldn't get enough.

by sunday afternoon it was time to go home. one of my colleagues very generously shared 3000 individual sound effects with me from her personal collection before I left, so I went home one very happy girl. we're already planning to organise a similar catch up in 2013.

hope you had a lovely weekend!

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