She's Apples

In the school holidays I was looking forward to taking the boys up to the Blue Mountains for the day so we went up the day before Ethan's birthday.  My favourite part of the Blue Mountains is along Bells Line of Road through Bilpin and Mt Tomah Botanical gardens.  I took my mum and sister there for a day out but we didn't have time to visit the botanical gardens as we had to be back in time for school pick up.

This time with the boys we had the whole day to ourselves.  The weather that week was pretty wet, however when we started going up the Mountains the sky stayed pretty dry for us and we even had some sunshine after our first stop at the Kurrajong lookout.

We stopped for apples, Royal Gala and Pink Lady at the Bilpin Fruit bowl, as well as an apple pie.  There are so many varieties of apples but those are my two favourites.  The apples are so fresh they were picked that morning, they have no stickers on them and they are sweet, crunchy and delicious.  On our way home I ended up stopping there again for another bag of Royal Gala's.  I had plans for making apple rhubarb pie.

Autumn leaves on my windscreen after parking under a tree.

We stopped at the Apple Bar for a lunch of wood fired pizza's and hot chocolates.  They truly are the best tasting pizza's.  Maybe it was the fresh air, sitting out on the verandah and maybe it was the Autumn leaves and woodsmoke but it was a lovely lunch.  The boys brought their books along to fill in time while we waited for our pizza's to cook and they were most well behaved and good company.

Once our bellies were full we were ready for a walk through the Mt Tomah Botanical gardens.  If you've never been there I heartily recommend a visit with the kids.  The gardens are beautiful, and there are many walks around into different sections and types of gardens, forests etc.  There are magnificent views from many aspects of the gardens too!

There was lots of running and jumping through the gardens, especially by Toby.  They all jumped off rocks, balconies, seats and ran down hills.  It was a beautiful afternoon for a bit of freedom.

My camera battery ran out, silly me forgot to charge it up the night before.  So I ended up taking a few photo's with Instagram on my iPod.