School ended in 1996 on the 20th Dec with another big church service. Together with the Swedish choir, I was asked to put together an English choir. ,,, those of you who have heard me sing can stop laughing now. Although it was a headache to organize, the children did very well at singing The First Noel and a song Jimmy Barns wrote for the Tin Lids called "Merry Christmas",,I had to have Australia represented somehow!!!

Well now the real adventure begins. 3 hours after the closing service Craig and I were on a plane,,, destination New York! Thanks to Craigs' numerous frequent flyer points accumulated from Taiwan, this trip was on the house. My dads two sisters live in New York and have been at us for some time to go and visit them. All in all we had a very hectic and much more luxurious trip compared with our past back packing experiences. In N.Y. we shopped, did all the touristy sites, shopped, saw Cats on Broadway, shopped and got spoilt rotten by my aunts. One weekend the 4 of us hired a car and drove to Pennsylvania to visit the Amish country which was very interesting. Even more interesting and amazing was my aunts' driving which I care not to mention (bad memories), apart from that I have never seen Craig so in control of his temper before. For New years eve we went to Times Square with the rest of N.Y. and got unpleasantly squashed,, but we did see the big apple fall.

On new years day we trained it down to Washington DC for a few whirlwind days. Once again we played the touristy role, highlights of which were a tour of the Pentagon, FBI headquarters and the White House for a few beers with Bill!! A lot of time was spent exploring the Air & Space and Natural history Museums which were both fascinating. We then went back to N.Y. for a day and flew out the next. Whilst in the US the weather was fantastic, we were even wearing t'shirts in Washington and the cherry blossoms were coming out. This time last year the place was covered with 2feet of snow!