Those dangerous sock knitters

We nearly missed our flight to Broome due to a couple of craft-related miscalculations on my part.

Firstly, Emma had some homework to do, so I told her to just throw her school pencilcase in her carry-on bag. Forgetting she had scissors in there. D'oh. Goodbye scissors.

Secondly, being aware of recently relaxed regulations allowing passengers to take knitting needles on board, I thought "Yahoo!" and packed a knitting project bag with some socks I was about to start.

Socks. Knitted on nice, pointy, thin, metal, Addi double-pointed needles. Put bag through security. "Uh, ma'am, what are these?"

"Knitting needles."

"Um. I'm going to have to check with someone."

"Oh. Okay." [thinking: Shit. They've probably never seen these and think of chunky straight needles for knitting basic scarves, when they think knitting needles. Shit. Those are expensive needles. The flight has started boarding!*]

After calling over a couple more people, they finally determined that I wasn't planning to stab someone with these pointy objects and let us through.

Needless to say, I packed them in the checked baggage for the return flight. I should also add that I got horribly tangled when winding a ball from the skein, and it took me so long to untangle, that I never got to start the damn socks anyway.

* I'm not an idiot. We got to the airport in heaps of time considering we checked-in online. Unfortunately the Virgin bag-drop line seemed to take longer than the actual check-in line, so we ended up almost late!

Surprisingly relaxing ...

... a holiday to Broome with three children.



We stayed at Captain's by the Bay, a gorgeous boutique complex of self-contained apartments. It's about halfway between Town Beach (the smaller beach on the Roebuck Bay side of the peninsula, as opposed to the touristy Cable Beach) and the town centre/Chinatown precinct. This meant we could walk to either of those in about 15 minutes.

I've seen a lot of travel reviews saying that one really needs a car to get around Broome. I disagree. As I said, we walked to both Town Beach and to Chinatown. When we wanted to go to Cable Beach, we used the excellent, privately-run Town Bus service. Children travel free with their paying parent/s! The bus comes every 30 minutes, which is very convenient. That said, we did hire a car on our last full day, because the kids really wanted to go to the Malcolm Douglas Wilderness Park, about 20km out of Broome itself. We visited the Mango Place while we were in the 10 Mile/12 Mile district, and drove to Cable Beach again afterwards to do an afternoon camel ride.

Broome is an expensive place for food, probably because of its isolated location. We found we got better value by eating out for lunch, and making a lighter dinner ourselves at the apartment. We did make an exception for a dinner at Matso's Brewery. Their ginger beer is soooo good (from a non-beer-drinker).

I far preferred the smaller Town Beach to Cable Beach. The red-tinged sand is beautiful, and because it's a bay, the water is clear with only very gentle lapping waves. Therefore the children could paddle out further, and we didn't get sand up our bottoms. There is also a nice cafe down there (reasonably priced for Broome - though beware the erratic opening hours), and the jewel in the crown is a free splash park for the kids.



All in all, we had a great time on our first-ever real holiday!*

* We've been to the Gold Coast and Sydney, but Garry's been working.