Don't mess with traditon

For the past few years we've celebrated Australia Day the same way, with a barbeque at a local reserve mainly with my husband's extended family. Usually we get a large turnout and then sit complaining about the heat. For this year I made a suggestion, instead of the local reserve why not go further afield to somewhere we could swim to cool off. My husband didn't want to change it but then booked an area at Bent's Basin for the day.

Only a small part of his family turned up, less than a quarter, most didn't even respond. My parents said it was too far away (just over half an hour), a cousin of his traveled 2 hours.

I realised while there that if all the family had turned up only a few would have swum so it would have been lots of complaining about the heat by those who don't. What it seems like in his family - actually in a lot of families that once you become an adult you give up things that you did as kid, swimming is one of them. Not for me, I love being immersed in water especially since losing my fear of deep water. It's really nice to swim out to the middle of the basin and just float there, usually. There were a lot of watercraft, blow up boats and a couple of canoes and after coming close to being run over by big inflatable boat I decided it was better to stick with the more crowded edges. It snuck up on me silently while my back was turned, the first hint I got was when I heard a voice say "oh sh*t, sorry". Turned a round to find the boat coming at me sideways, was able to put my hands out to fend it off and work myself around the bow, it was the largest toy inflatable boat I had ever seen.

We took our canoe which has gathered dust for the last couple of years in the garage and I had a paddle across the basin but decided that it was too nerve racking to be on the lookout for people in the water, hitting someone with a hard sided canoe would be much worse than an infllatable one.

Next year it will be back to the old faithful and back to complaining about the heat.