They're not shrimp, they're prawns!

I'd been looking forward to my semi-yearly trip to Blues Traveler at Red Rocks a couple of months ago when my mother mentioned to me, "Now, I know you usually go to Colorado over the 4th of July...". Uh oh. Not a good start. Turns out she'd scheduled a family reunion for that weekend with the knowledge that my family from Australia would be coming to visit (short detour: my uncle went over to Australia as part of a teaching program after graduating from college, met another American teacher while he was over there, got married and decided to stay there despite him being from Long Island and her being from West Virginia. They have two sons around our age.)

I put off the decision for a while, knowing that BT had a July 3rd show planned at a little club in Denver, thinking I could take some time during the week, since they'd be around for a while. But then came the bombshell - my relatives from Long Island would be visiting.

Now, some of you may be pulling out your maps, almanacs and globes, comparing the distance to Maine from Australia and from Long Island, and scratching your heads. Well, you'd be right to do so, except for the fact that my Long Island relatives don't go anywhere for anything. Case in point - they didn't even come up for the rehearsal dinner when we got married. They breezed in, went to the wedding, and breezed out the same day. So for them to be coming to Maine for a WHOLE WEEKEND was really an earth-is-moving event. So that basically made the decision - no Colorado for me.

Except that the Long Islanders cancelled a month later. LOVING them at this point.

Still, we had a nice family weekend anyway. Got to go home and basically act like a child again - played some Super Nintendo, watched some slides/home movies, learned how to use the reel-to-reel and taught my uncle how to record to his laptop, played some pinochle (and won), and even played a new game with my brother called Settlers of Catan (which we promptly dubbed alternately "Settlers of Chris Kattan" and "Settlers of Tawny Kitaen"). It's a cool strategy game that involves a board of various hexagonal pieces each representing a resource, and you place settlements on the board at the intersection of the hexes. Everyone starts with two settlements and two roads (at the ends of which you eventually build more settlements), and you build up your civilization based on dice rolls and the resources in the hexes your settlements border. Eventually you can build cities, which can manufacture commodities, giving you an advantage over players who just have settlements, and so on. At its most basic, a game lasted an hour and a half, and when we went with one set of add-ons, the game lasted over four hours. Definitely a game different from any I've ever played before.

But of course, having Australian cousins just isn't complete unless you have the obligatory run-in with Americans who aren't expecting Aussie accents. We went down to a town park called Fort Williams, which used to be a harbor defense post for the Portland area until it was decommissioned in the 1960's. On the grounds of the fort are the remains of a large mansion that was built for/by a retired colonel in the early 1800's, and we happened to run into a couple that was honeymooning in the area. My mother offered to take a picture but couldn't figure out their camera, so she called on Andrew, who is a gadgetry whiz. They heard his accent and while we were walking away, one of them wondered aloud if he was from Australia, except they weren't sure because he hadn't said "mate". So just for a laugh, he gave them the old "G'day, mate! Toss another shrimp on the barbie!" rundown. And just as we were getting out of earshot, he rolled his eyes and said in a slightly louder-than-normal voice, "They're not shrimp! They're PRAWNS!" Apparently no native Australian has ever used that phrase. And don't get them started on the Outback Steakhouse or Foster's...