Fair weather greeted us last Tuesday morning as 32 descendants/family and friends boarded the ‘Island Explorer ‘ run by the Manning Valley River Cruises. Marie & crew greeted us with morning tea & homemade biscuits as we cruised up to Croki.

Our Skipper was very informative  with commentary on the Manning River history & some of the old iconic buildings such as the Old Butter Factory on Scotts Creek. Beautiful old & new homesteads dotted the waters edge at both Manning & Mitchell Islands.

Arriving at Croki we were greeted by Darren who had been creating a hearty camp oven lunch of either chicken or lamb & vegetables – we stretched our legs and then sat down to a Christmas lunch on our return journey.

A bit of fun with Kris Kringle game between Main and Dessert course – on boarding the vessel you swap your present for a raffle ticket- as your raffle ticket is drawn out you can choose a present on the table – you can keep it or swap with a previously chosen present -of course the lucky last person has the pick of all the previous open gifts and they can take their pick of all the presents. A little swapping went on until everyone went away with something they were happy with.

Thanks to Lorraine Ryan for donating some gifts which were later Auctioned.

Returning back to Taree we were served Cheese Cake/Pavlova for an ending to a perfect day of local history/hearty tucker/great company and perfect cruising weather. Cheers and applause went out for the skipper and crew for their hard work to make it a wonderful day.

We were reminded by a few transcripts of our descendants for Christmas Day 1787 that we have a lot to be thankful for in our modern world with so many choices and options in food/travel & family connections in our lives while the descendants were just trying to survive with little knowledge or control over their future/destination or ever seeing their loved ones again.