Back in April we had our first real holiday in about four years. It was a grand old time we had in the North and South Islands of New Zealand and, though we went for 19 days, we really wished we could’ve had longer. We listened to a lot of advice from family, friends and colleagues before we went and did our research so we always had a rough plan though we generally played it by ear each day.
I’m not sure why we decided to go to New Zealand just as winter approached especially as we haven’t really seen much of Australia. I estimate that, from Sydney, we’ve been about 160 miles south (Canberra), 70 miles west (Jenolan Caves) and about 270 miles north (Coffs Harbour). That’s about 30,000 square miles out of the 30,000,000 available to us; only 1% of the country.
Continue reading “New Zealand” »
This is from a few years ago, I just put together the various bits of the video today. For Oscar’s first birthday Roz made a Wiggles Big Red Car cake. It took about 7 hours and a lot of icing.
Continue reading “Roz Made a Wiggles Cake” »
Yesterday we went shopping for some stuff for New Zealand. Top of my list was some new walking shoes as my old ones had been making hissing noises for over a year. So today I wanted to break them in a bit. Was intending to go finish off the Balmoral Beach to Chowder Bay part of the walk we missed out on two days ago but the buses were not playing ball on Zombie Sunday so I decided to go for a wander near where we live instead. Didn’t plan much except to head out the house with Roz to visit that really nice bakery at the top of Blues Point Road.
Continue reading “McMahons, Milsons, Kirribilli” »
This was another filling in the gap walk. It was originally to be the Spit Bridge to Chowder Bay as I particularly wanted to show Roz the views up on the Middle Head part of the walk but it wasn’t to be. We wanted to be sure Roz’s knee was good for New Zealand next week so we started the walk on the south side of the bridge to cut out about 1km.
Continue reading “Spit Bridge to Balmoral Beach” »
We are still here. Have not updated since May 2008! And had the site taken down for about a year. Apologies to the two concerned citizens of the world who wondered where it had all gone and also to those who did worry but not enough to ask.
We remain in Australia, I am still working for the same company I was with two years ago. Though it has been taken over by another. Which has taken over two others too. Which means lots of redundant positions in the company. Which means I’m on a shoogly peg. So we are back on the visa trail again. This time aiming for permanent residency so that when I do get the boot we won’t have to leave the country. Won’t bore you with that just now but prepare yourself for later posts.
Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of draft posts from years ago that I’ll publish soon (all with the old dates so they’ll appear older than this post) and then we’ll get back to updating here – maybe I’ll finally convince Roz to write here too. We’re off to New Zealand for about 2.5 weeks after Easter so will post whenever we get the chance there.
I’ve moved all the old gallery pictures to flickr for a number of reasons. At the moment the old posts still point to the internal gallery as I can’t be bothered relinking just now and so some of the aligning will be a wee bit out on them. On one of the sidebars is what flickr deems to be our more ‘interesting’ photos. No idea what that means. Don’t be surprised to find some old black and white pictures in there as I’m sharing that account with our genealogy pictures.
That is all.
As I mentioned last week, we are trying to walk all of the harbour so, as we’ve covered from North Sydney to Cremorne Point and Taronga Zoo to Middle Head before then we though we’d fill in a gap of Cremorne Point to Taronga Zoo. It makes sense if you have OCD yourself.
Continue reading “Cremorne Point to Taronga Zoo” »
We’ve recently started to make a concerted effort to go on nice long walks again. Starting small, building up kind of thing so that by the time the sun goes away and the temperature dips below 0°J we can tackle the Great North Walk again. Ultimately our plan is to have walked the entire Sydney Harbour foreshore. We’ve already covered a good portion of it now we’re filling in the gaps.
Continue reading “Walk from Taronga Zoo to Middle Head” »
A few pictures from the always interesting Sculpture by the Sea exhibition between Bondi and Tamarama Beach:
Today we tried to do the Seven Bridges Walk which is a 27km circular walk across 7 of Sydney Harbour’s bridges. We started early at Milson’s Point, walked across the Harbour Bridge, down to Darling Harbour and across to the Anzac Bridge through Rozelle. It was here that the rain that had been threatening started to chuck it down. We made it to Iron Cove Bay, where we first started walks when we arrived in Australia, and had a bite to eat.
Many people were abandoning the walk but we decided to continue and headed across the Iron Cove Bridge when we remembered that the free ferry was going from Birkenhead to Milson’s Point. So, drenched as we were, that’s the way we went, skipping about 10km of the walk. We managed about 12km today but I feel a cold coming on.
