I’ve dubbed this past weekend the ‘weekend of chocolate’. I think I’ve eaten more chocolate in the last 72 hours than I normally eat in an entire year.

It all started with the arrival of my friend Stephanie who came to visit from Melbourne for the weekend. She arrived on Thursday night, complete with two large blocks of Cadbury’s chocolate. Normally I don’t have chocolate in the house, so it was a real treat to have blocks of chocolate. I had Friday off work to spend with Steph, but unfortunately the weather ruined our plans. It wasn’t as bad as last weekend, but it still severely restricted our options. So, instead of going out for walks and taking photographs, we stayed inside on Friday. I decided to make banana muffins and Steph decided that they had to have choc chips in them. The shop at the front of the complex had choc chips, so that sealed the deal and they were added to the mix.

So the chocolate blocks and the choc-banana muffins were devoured over the weekend. Saturday, with flash flooding still being forecast and lots of roads impassable due to fallen trees, we decided that our safest bet would be to stay home. None of us really wanted to go out walking around in the storms anyway. Because we’d stayed home, Andrew decided that he really should go and play hockey. So Steph and I dropped him off at the ground soon after 3 pm and we went for a drive. We went to a lookout on Prince of Wales drive which looked out over Botany Bay entrance, and then we drove to La Perouse to go for a walk on Bare Island. However, once we got there the rain started pelting down on us with strong winds driving it sideways, so we ran back to the car and sat there for a while waiting for it to ease, but it didn’t.

We decided to see if the boys were still playing hockey in this weather and drove back to the hockey ground. They’d been playing for about half an hour when we got there and the ground was almost flooded. The ball didn’t go far when they hit it, being slowed down by all the water. It was the first time I’d seen them running faster than the ball could be hit! The rain kept coming in storms with a few minutes between. I couldn’t believe that they played on, but they did. At half time Andrew’s team was up 1/0 and they’d wanted to call it quits, but the other team didn’t want to and so they played the entire game through the storms and finally lost 1/2. The players in the next game weren’t so tough, and their match was called off. I really don’t blame them, I wouldn’t have wanted to go out there and play either! We took a saturated Andrew home to dry off and warm up.

Sunday there was still rain forecast, but we thought it might not be as bad as the last two days, so we went into the city. We wandered around Hyde Park, went on the monorail, browsed Paddy’s Market and ended up in China Town for a yum cha lunch. Then we stopped at the Lindt place that Andrew and I saw last time we were in the city together. Andrew had a coffee, Steph had a hot chocolate and I had an iced mocca. We chose a little chocolate each to have with our drinks. It was all so chocolatey and sweet!! The photos above are from our afternoon tea at Lindt.

From there it was down to the Rocks area and the Opera House, and we caught the train home from Circular Quay. It was trying to rain by that stage but it was really only spitting, so it didn’t slow us down! We dropped Steph off at the airport at around 6 pm.

It was a nice weekend, and great to see Steph. We need the rain, and apparently some of it has fallen in the right place to help our parched dams. But it really did restrict our weekend movements.