Sunday Slideshow (Aug#1)

Today's Sunday Slideshow is brought to you from the Ingham Australian-Italian Festival.  With over 50% of the residents of Ingham being of Italian descent the town has earned the name of Little Italy, and it's yearly festival celebrates and commemorates the Italian heritage of the town.

 

This is the second time we have headed north to Ingham in the last few months.  It's a lovely 110km drive through the Queensland sugar cane fields. Cane fields are one of my earliest memories from when I moved to Australia 11 years ago from the UK.  I loved seeing the beautiful bright blue cloudless skies against the uniform rows of tall wispy cane crops, beautiful!  So what with our love of Sunday drives, and our love of Italian food, The Ingham Australian-Italian Festival was the perfect excuse to head north and enjoy the scenery, food and entertainment that this tiny cane farming town has to offer...

(Unfortunately it was rather overcast today at times so my photos are quite pants - I am still learning to use a DSLR). 

 

As we arrived in Ingham we came across the sign above, which I had to include in this post as we have so many American readers. I thought you might be interested in this little bit of history...

Taken from Australian Screen-

Success has many fathers, as the saying goes, but few successes have had so many claims to paternity as Slim Dusty’s most famous song.

The facts, more or less, are that an Irish-born cane farmer named Dan Sheahan came to the Day Dawn Hotel in Ingham, north Queensland, one day in late 1943, but the pub had run out of beer. American servicemen, either stationed nearby or passing through to Cairns, had drunk the place dry (of beer) the previous night. According to one account, Sheahan sat in a corner with a warm glass of wine and penned a poem, ‘A Pub Without Beer’.

For more go to - ASO

Anyway, once we arrived we headed straight for the food tents as we were so hungry...soooo hungry that we forgot to take any pictures of the food...but suffice to say it was all lovely, Sasha chose a freshly made pizza, Poppy had her favourite meal of Spaghetti Carbonara, and Col and I enjoyed Spaghetti Bolognaise and Chorizo hotdogs. 

As our girls love nothing more than to 'create' things, they pleaded to go to the craft tents and make...stuff!

 

 

Sasha made an egg carton caterpillar and Poppy made a crown...that Dad wore!

 

 

  

 

After a lovely Vanilla, Ferrero Rocher and Amaretto Gelato...we headed up to the TYTO Wetlands Centre, (this is where the Festival is held).  According to their website (here) it is one of Australia's largest urban wetland rehabilitation projects.  From the viewing platform you can see out over the vast wetlands that fill this 120 hectare site, it's amazing and will be a place we head back to another time to discover fully.

 

 

 

 

On the way home we managed to find some fields where they were harvesting the crops, I had desperately wanted to see a cane train full to it's brim but no luck this time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended up being stuck in a loooong traffic jam on the way home, but after a 25 minute stand-still we began to move very slowly..

 

 
A few minutes later we noticed a couple of people taking a windy side road off to the right

 

So we followed, as did many behind us, and travelled adjacent to the thick traffic jam to our left, the kids loved it, thinking we were being really naughty and daring...bless them! 

 

 

The windy road took us all the way around the jam and back onto the highway...yayyy! 

 

Another fab weekend over...now it's back to the reality of school, kinder, work and for me...Sunshine and Paint Pots as I head into the last stretch of interior painting this week....yawn!

 

Ciao for now!!

 

K xx