Kristarella's Castle

Today's guest is my new friend Kristarella from Australia. She's a cool chick who works hard, has lots of faith, and is learning what it's like to be a newlywed! Please welcome her and enjoy her thoughts as much as I do.

Mags' trip to Disney World has got me thinking about my childhood. There was a time that was really nice (not that the rest was horrible). It
must have been the early primary school time. Possibly even before that.

When I was young my favourite movie was The Wizard of Oz and whenever anyone asked me my name I would tell them it was "Dorothy", although I said it more like "Dorthy". For a dress up day at school I came as Dorothy. Mum made me this great blue-check pinafore and I had my hair in pigtails. I even had a basket with a little puppy in it. Not a real puppy but a mechanical one that when you turned it on it would bark and jump backwards and then it would do a backwards flip.

Soon before my brother was born (probably soon before he was conceived) we went on a family trip to Queensland. We went to Nara Resort and we visited Sea World. Sea World is a theme park, it is cool! It was to me then anyway.

I was too afraid to go on the Corkscrew rollercoaster. I think my dad went on it twice! I loved the Pirate show! It was this show on water with a ship and water skis and the big nasty pirate had this big funny costume. It was called Pirates of Paradise. I even got to feed
the dolphins!


After we left Sea World we went to Curumbin Sanctuary Park, it had
hundreds of birds and you could hand feed them.

In that time Mum realised that the whole time we were at Sea World there was no film in the camera! She convinced Dad that we absolutely had to go back and take all the photos again. So we did!

I'm sure at the time for me it was great, I'm not sure I knew that the photos weren't taken, to me it was another trip to Sea World! I'm glad we got to take the photos again because without them I think I wouldn't be able to remember as many things as I can.

One thing that is moderately vivid in my mind was my shock when getting photos with the crew of Pirates of Paradise when they got close to me
they were all wet! And they got me wet! Now I think "Duh, they've just
been water skiing."

On that trip we stayed at a small resort type place with a swimming
pool and there was a lady there who gave me the book The Hungry Caterpillar. I think there may have been a honeymooning
couple there too because I remember being in the pool (with my floaties on my arms - they're buoyancy things for kids learning to swim, I don't
know what the rest of the world calls them) and Mum and Dad had to keep telling me not to swim too far down the other end of the pool where a young couple was.

One of the funniest things from that trip was on the way up, we were in
the old green SAAB and it suddenly conked out. So Dad opened up the
bonnet, possibly with the intention to put water in, maybe just to see
what was going on.

It turned out the reason the car had stopped working was because Dad had left one of his old singlets in the engine! He used to use the old holey ones as rags and he must have been putting oil in the car and left his rag in there. That was a problem easily fixed.

Hope you're having a good time Mags!