It had been a tradition for as long as I'd been alive, that we spent Australia day at the Altena's house. The Altenas were our family friends. Badi Altena was my dad's best friend who he'd gone to university with. He and his wife, Ina had two children, Aphra and Cheryl, who I'd known all my life. On these Australia days, several other dentist families who had gone to uni with my parents and Badi were often invited, but usually not many of them came. A lot of years it was just us, the Altenas and the Yamamotos.
Nathasha Yamamoto had been one of my mum's best friends in university. She and her husband Carl had been married on the day I was born, so my parents had missed their wedding. They had two children as well: Iva and Edeline, who Zale and I had also known all our lives and were close with. On the occasions where it was just our three families, the adults referred to it as an 'Altena-Whiete-Yamamoto show'. Us kids usually referred to it as a 'gathering of dentists and their PJO fanatic children.' The six of us had an iMessage group chat together which we had named 'PJO fanatic dentist children ,,,,,,' because our parents were all dentists and we spent most of our time together obsessing over Percy Jackson. We also added a comma to represent each of us because we Respect the Commas!
This Australia day was a gathering of dentists and their PJO fanatic children. Like most Australia days, the six of us spent the morning in the pool, only getting out for lunch. We played all our usual pool games: hot chocolate, pool Olympics, Percy Jackson charades, Marco Polo, underwater Chinese whispers etc. Iva, Edeline, Zale and Cheryl went back in the pool pretty much straight after lunch, but Aphra and I opted to wait a while before going back in. We found ourselves talking about school, books, how her mum was going to go back to university and get a teaching degree, and mostly our plans for our 2031 trip to the Kimberleys again.
Zale, Mum, Dad and I had been to the Kimberley region once in 2011 for Mum's 40th birthday with the Altenas. We'd gone from Broom to Mary Pool, Lake Argyle and then did the Gibb River Road from El Questro, detouring up to Mitchell falls, back down to Manning Gorge, to Bell Gorge, where we were on Mum's actual birthday, to Winjana Gorge and then back to Broome. When we were in El Questro, we'd done El Questro gorge, which was my favourite of all the gorges we did. We had only done half of it though because the second half was supposed to be challenging and we were quite young then. Zale had only been six, and Cheryl, who had just bumped her head as well, was only seven. I had really wanted to do the whole thing though, which I had told Aphra after the walk back.
'We'll have to come back and do it another time,' she'd said, 'when we're adults.'
'Yes. We'll have to do it around when we've finished uni. I'll be finished high school in 2020, which means Zale will finish in 2022. I highly doubt he'll take more than eight years to graduate university, which will leave him at least one year to work if we do it in 2031. You'll be 30 then so if we leave it any later, you'll probably have kids in the picture which isn't ideal.'
'2031 it is then,' Aphra had agreed. 'We'll plan a Kimberley holiday for the four of us that year.'
'2031 will be The Year for the Kimberley Klub,' I'd said. We'd referred to the four of us as the Kimberley Klub ever since.
We'd been planning the holiday since then. We had our itinerary set already and were in the process of trying to estimate how much it would cost.
'Do you think we'll drive up there with a camper trailer or hire tents while we're up there?' Aphra asked me now. When we'd done the Kimberley trip in 2011, the Altenas had driven up with the camper trailer while we'd flown into Broome and hired a tent.
'I like the idea of driving up there, because then we get to use our own things and we get a longer holiday, but prolonging the holiday by over a week could be pretty expensive and we might be kind of done by the end of it. Our itinerary at the moment is already a four week holiday. Hiring a tent might be a better idea.'
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