Month: April 2013

 

Ryan, Sam, Jessica, Sophie and Megan at picnic            Taking OZ lying down

Grandpa’s big brekkie too much for Sophie

Frankie on a bicycle built for 2

Picture of an ever-smiling Grandma

Alliteration is a literary stylistic device, but in this case ‘Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran’ ideally nominates some of the activities undertaken on a recent limited seniors’ tour of the south west.

We joined Bill and Wendy Moodie on a day-trip to Augusta and surrounds, for all of us it had been a decade or more since we had been in the area. The old relics refers to the now fossilised working parts from a long forgotten era and seen here on the beach at Leeuwin.

For us it was fortunate the BOM had failed to accurately forecast the weather for the capes that day, so lunch was taken outdoors on the lawn of the Augusta Hotel with views overlooking the Blackwood river where it flows into the Southern Ocean.

Hamelin Bay with its now derelict semblance of a jetty was also a picture evoking thoughts of perhaps taking a beachfront cabin next spring.

And the majestic Boranup Forest which never fails to impress showed her mighty form and colourful grandeur amid the dappled late afternoon sunlight; the splendour of nature that has a certain stateliness which all admire.

With days end and seeking for further amusement we paid and went into Amigos Mexican restaurant in Dunsborough where we had margaritas, coronas, dips, tacos and burritos.

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Until now we have had FiFo miners, FiFo families and even FiFo wives with the latest development according to Erin Laurance, being the FiFo grandparents. And the logical extension to the FiFo phenomenon, of which there is a reported 50,000 people in Western Australia into FiFo jobs, is the DiDo or drive-in drive-out workers and grandparents.

For grandparents seeking an unsurpassed, top flight lifestyle, towing a donga on wheels and parking in a caravan park on the wrong side of the tracks, provides neither a king-size bed, room service, Sky News and peerless en-suite facilities. So it is with some reluctance that grandma and grandpa have taken up the FiFo option, becoming more like FiFiFo aficionados’. (Forever Into Fly-In Fly-out)

But unlike Fly-in fly-out employment which can put stress on family relationships, Grandparent FiFo brings the benefits of forward planning of school holiday child-minding duties, dinner gatherings and celebratory occasions such as birthdays and the like.

In the recent past DiDo been mingled with the GP FiFo, either taking on a motor-home relocation or getting the new Falcon G6 out of the ‘lock and leave’ facility in Winthrop and driving for a couple of days in order to actually exit this vast state of ours and onto the Adelaide Hills and nearby eastern states destinations.

Secretly however, grandma and grandpa are genuine devotees of SiSo (ship-in ship-out) racking up something like 150 nights on Princess cruise vessels and earning platinum status into the bargain. Platinum enables you to leave your shoes outside the door in the evening and or to receive free satellite Wi-Fi so that you can sit up in bed in the morning and read the papers on your iPad