Change In Plans

Greetings from Kingscote, Australia, the capital city of Kangaroo Island.  

This very short post is just to let you (collectively) know that we have arrived here, had several comical experiences on the ferry, at the car rental office, and on the long drive from Penneshaw (where the ferry lands) to our rented house on Snelling Beach.  Last night, in Cape Jervis, we even had a classic “What’s the pentagram on the wall for?” pub experience at the local tavern.

Based on the unbelievable amount of roadkill we have seen, the kangaroos for whom the island is named appear to be largely suicidal.  I guess “Suicidal Kangaroo Island” might not have been so great for attracting tourists.

More to come later, once we have an internet connection.  There does not even appear to be cell phone/BlackBerry coverage here, so we got 15 minutes of coverage at a pub in Kingscote.  Adventure awaits!

Greetings from the B23 motorway, just south of Adelaide, in South Australia. We are in the home stretch (sort of) of a long and surprisingly complicated trip to Kangaroo Island.

After my mild whiny despair of yesterday afternoon, we had a nice early evening walk in search of the elusive duck-billed platypus. We then found an unused deck on the west side of the lodge, where India and I could enjoy sunset drinks, and Zola and Tallulah could run and be wild. It was particularly fun observing other guests encounter wombats and wallabies on the paths as they walked down to dinner. It was a little like watching Punk’d, but no Ashton Kutcher.

Unfortunately, I could not sleep at all after mindight. At Zola’s request, I had agreed to read “The Time Paradox,” the sixth and final book in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series. So, at around 4:30 am I was finishing the complicated adventures of the Irish boy criminal, his female fairy companion, and hairy dwarf/miner ally. I’m slightly embarrassed by how much I liked the book. Zola thinks I am marginally cooler today, so I’ve got that going for me.

Before we left this morning, India and Zola went on a final nature walk. They did not see the platypus (missed by a few seconds), but they did find an albino wallaby, which Zola was very excited about.

We started by driving from Cradle Mountain Park back to Devonport. It was only about 80 kilometers, but the road was twisty and narrow, so it took about an hour and a half. We saw an echidna goofing around by the roadside, which is incredibly cool.

Devonport doesn’t appear to have much going on, so we hung around the airport for a long time instead. Tallulah was happy to get toasted sandwiches from the same shop where we ate when we arrived in Tasmania last week.

Strangely, there is no security (literally none) before boarding the turboprop flight from Devonport to Melbourne. As we disembarked, however, we went through the whole X-ray, no liquids, computers out routine before being allowed to enter Melbourne airport from the tarmac. Interesting approach. They confiscated Zola’s one centimeter toy pocket knife.

After changing planes in Melbourne, we had a very bumpy ride to Adelaide, landing at about 5 pm. Adelaide is in a semi-different time zone from Melbourne, so we set our watches back to 4:30 again.

Qantas lost India’s bag somewhere. This is the first time it has happened on any part of the trip, so we count ourselves lucky, That said, it meant another 90 minutes in the Adelaide airport, sorting that mess out. Theoretically the bag will catch up with us tonight.

It is about 150 kilometers from Adelaide to Cape Jervis, where the ferry leaves for Kangaroo Island. Everyone we asked -tourism information guy, taxi dispatcher, taxi driver - winced when we asked about taking a taxi, and said, “Ooh, that would cost a fortune. No one takes a taxi there.” Even the desk ladies at Avis and Budget, while explaining that we could not feasibly rent a car for the trip told us, “Ooh, a taxi would cost a fortune.”

Faced with the prospect of walking or waiting 12 hours at the airport for a bus, we pushed for some quantification of the “Ooh, that’s a fortune.” comment. Turns out to be about $US 120, or about $US 40 more than the bus.

So here we are, heading southwest into the sunset, packed comfortably into a taxi. Kangaroo Island appears to have a lot more to do than rural Tasmania did. We are looking forward to getting on the ferry and getting there.

WOMBAT!

Greetings from Tasmania! We are in the Cradle Mountain National Park, spending a few days hiking and looking at Tasmania’s definitely weird wildlife.

We drove across Tasmania on Sunday, leaving Freycinet on the east coast, cutting back through Launceston in the center, and right up into the west coast mountains. We have been looking at too many wall-size maps of Tasmania, which make that journey look epic in its length and complexity. In reality, Tasmania is pretty small, and the whole drive took about 4 scenic hours.

Similar to the age-discrimination challenges we faced in Freycinet, children are basically not allowed to do anything fun at the Cradle Mountin Lodge either. Canoeing is restricted to 14 years and older, there are no kids’ mountain bikes, and they laughed when we asked about horse riding. Litigators and insurance companies appear to dominate Australian tourism. This has left us with a few beautiful walks, a visit to the Tasmanian Devil rescue center, and the wackiest game drive of our lives.

I will write a post about the Devils and the game drive later, when I have a proper internet connection. We saw a lot of animals (wallabies, pademelons, quoll, wombats, etc.), but both event were so comic that I laugh thinking about it.

The hikes have been very scenic, but with a beauty more subtle than that of the east coast. This part of Tasmania gets three meters of rain a year, which is an enormous amount. Even though it is the height of summer, the days have been very cool and cloudy, with intermittent rain. It seems more like Vancouver or Scotland than Australia.

Yesterday we did a 10-kilometer walk from Dove Lake back to the Cradle Mountain park entrance. Most of the way we were on an elaborate wooden boardwalk, with chicken wire embedded in the boards for traction. The boardwalk saves wear and tear on the plant life, I guess, and it is a pretty remarkable feat of engineering and carpentry. The hike runs past glacial lakes, through heathered fields, over riverine gorges, and into medieval-looking forest. All of this is in the brooding, mist-shrouded shadow of Cradle Mountain.

Dramatic and beautiful.

This morning we walked 9 kilometers around Dove Lake, which is at the base of the mountain. Apparently, in the 1820s, the English surveyor named the lake for his boss, Mr. Dove. The lake looked cold and dark against the gray skies and brown/green vegetation.

Zola has been a total trooper on these hikes, trundling along in his Crocs, and enjoying himself greatly. For the most part, Tallulah has been riding on my shoulders, but she was excited to wear a hood and run along the boardwalk in the rain yesterday.

India, of course, is in her element. She has been running 15 kilometers in the park in the early morning, then returning on these hikes later in the day. Between the walking/running and all of the animal tracking, this is heavenly for her.

I, on the other hand, am going a little crazy. Being this isolated, with limited intellectual stimulation or social activity, is … is… is… is probably building character and making me a better person. Either that or I will start drinking beer in the lodge pub after breakfast. Learning about ourselves is part of travel, I guess. We are all learning that I get grouchy in isolation.

Tomorrow we drive up to Devonport, and fly to Adelaide, connecting through Melbourne.
We stay over near Adelaide, and then take a ferry to Kangaroo Island on Thursday morning. On Kangaroo Island we will be staying in a very isolated place, hiking in the rain and looking at Australian animals. We will see how I do. When I go back to work, I am sure I will look back on these bucolic days and family hikes with enormous pleasure.

Happy Valentine’s Day from Tasmania! We are in the Freycinet National Park, on a wild peninsula off of Tasmania’s east coast. We are off the beaten track, I think.

We arrived here two days ago, after a longer-than-expected drive down from Devonport. The total distance was only about 350 kilometers, but the roads are narrow and twisty.   It took about 6 hours in our repurposed Australian 1994 Chevy Malibu station wagon.

We stopped in a town called Launceston, which is Australia’s third-oldest European settlement (after Sydney and Hobart, as we all know). Launceston has an attraction called “First Basin,” which features an old-fashioned chairlift going across a deep river gorge. It was the first time that Zola had ever been on a chairlift, so he thought this was very cool. We hiked around on the far side for a while, had an impossibly slow lunch, saw a few wallabies, and headed back to the parking lot.  A terrific lunch stop.

We also stopped to taste wine at a vineyard called Milton, about 30 kilometers from the park entrance. Tasmanian wine is good, and the setting of the tasting room was spectacular, looking out over the rolling hills and low mountains. There was an elderly Tasmanian couple in the tasting room with us, buying wine for their son’s 60th-birthday celebration (!!!). I tried to strike up a conversation with them, but they were quite deaf, and it was difficult.

We are staying at Freycinet Lodge (www.puretasmania.com.au), which is a privately owned lodge within the park. The location is unbelievably beautiful: perched on a hillside with a clear bay and a long stretch of white beach on one side, and rugged, rocky mountains on the other. It feels like, and is, the end of the road. We are staying in a comfortable little cabin, looking out over the mountains.

I got off to a bit of a bad start with the activities people at the lodge. Australia is surprisingly litigation and liability driven. Our kids were not allowed to do any of the water-based activities at the lodge, because there are no kids’-sized life jackets available, and the insurance company won’t let guests use their own.

The dialogue went something like:

     “So the harbor cruise is out?”

     “Afraid so.”

     “And we can’t go kayaking”

     “Sorry.”

     “And the hike which we booked where you pick us up in the boat at the end, we have to cancel?”

     “Afraid so.”

     “Well, at least we can still do the quad biking, right? No need for life jackets there.”

     “Well, unfortunately we don’t alow anyoe under 14 on the bikes either.”

     “Aaaaaggghhh.”

The guides were as gracious as they could be, and were a little embarrassed by the restrictions (there were many more than I am describing). They even offered to call their competitors and see whether their rules were less restrictive.

In the end, we found some activities which were allowed, and have had a great couple of days here.

Yesterday we did a long (five hours) guided hike over Mount Amos, down into the Tasman Sea-facing Wineglass Bay, over an isthmus, along the inland-bay headlands, and back to the lodge. It was very beautiful, and having the guide, a very nice New Zealander named Dan, gave Zola someone to talk to the whole way. I carried Tallulah in a backpack, which made he hike more of a workout than I have had in months.

After dinner last night, we spent a couple of hours on the beach, playing in the sand and splashing in the calm water. We saw a sting ray gliding around that had to have been a meter across. As the sun set, the interplay of the light, the clear water, and the ridged-sand yellow beach was almost unspeakably beautiful. It was like nothing I have seen before.

The main activity today (aside from me being a grouch, for reasons I don’t understand) was kayaking in the late afternoon.  We went with one of the lodge’s competitors, as suggested by the guides.  We were out on the water for about three hours: India and Tallulah (the littlest kayaker) in one boat, and Zola and me in another.  With two guides, we paddled in and out of the bays, and along the beaches.  We saw many more rays in the water, and  saw a  wallaby  on the beach when we stopped for sunset drinks.  Zola is a wonderful kid, but we determined that he is not yet ready to steer a kayak.

Tomorrow morning we leave Freycinet for the long drive over to Cradle Mountain, clear on the other side of Tasmania.  The drive-time estimates we have heard range from four to seven hours.  We will be in a similar lodge (with fewer age restrictions, I hope), in a much wilder and wetter part of the island.  I will try to add some pictures from the last two days when we have internet access.

Greetings from Tasmania!

We left our hotel in Melbourne early this morning (after I endured a 4 am conference call), heading out for the airport with plenty of time. As we found out, Melbourne is bigger, more complicated, and more poorly roadsigned than we anticipated. Even with multiple maps, directions, and good intentions, we had a difficult time finding the airport. Incidentally, there are four airports in Melbourne, which added to the complication. But we made it, with only a few moments of pilot-navigator unpleasantness. Fortunately the kids slept through it all.

Even in a little turboprop puddle jumper, the flight to Devonport only takes about 90 minutes. We flew over the Tasman Sea, and landed almost immediately after we were over land again.

From the air, Tasmania is a rural idyll: rolling hills, patchwork farms, small country roads. As we landed, I’m embarrassed to say that the first thing I thought of was the mythical Island of Sodor, from Thomas the Tank Engine. Toot toot!

The title of this blog post is ironic. We are in a tiny town at the edge of the world. It looks and feels like Maine in early October, but with more sheep. The air is brisk.

We rented a “Holden Commodore” station wagon for our drive down to Freycinet National Park. Holden is GM’s Australian brand, and I am pretty certain we have rented a 1994 Chevy Malibu. Styling.

The drive is supposed to take about 2 hours, and is supposed to be very beautiful. Our eyes are peeled for Tasmanian Devils. This all feels somehow pretty exotic.

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Greetings from St. Kilda, a bohemian beach suburb of Melbourne. We arrived yesterday afternoon, after the long (very long) drive from Sydney.

As I noted in my breakfast blog post from Manly (Sydney), when the fires first became big news, it seemed strange to be driving into the heart of a Page 1 disaster area. This feeling grew as we drove southwest, and listened to the live ABC radio broadcasts on location from the command posts near various fires.

We did not see any actual fires burning, but we did see a lot of mid-distance smoke in a few sites east of Melbourne. We drove through several spots along the highway where all of the vegetation had burned off. We also saw many ash-covered cars and trucks, and emergency vehicles racing off into the hills.

Most of our experience of the fires, though, has been listening to the radio, and (especially) reading the newspapers. The headlines of the local and national papers read: “Apocalypse Now,” and “Our Darkest Hour,” and “Our Most Tragic Losses.”. The stories are a mix of truly tragic -young kids killed saving their horses, families wiped out when their cars wouldn’t start- and feel good miracle rescues. The color photos and transcripts of emergency calls make the stories more poignant and real. 200 deaths feels like quite a lot when you are reading about dinner-party conversations last week, and frantic efforts to get into crawl spaces.

We have become familiar with the acronym “CFA,” which is the Country Fire Authority. In every story, the CFA firefighters are cast in the role of heroes. Invariably they are absolved explicitly of blame for not saving more people.

In all of the news coverage, and in interviews with survivors and distraught relatives, there is a strange obsession with figuring out which fires were deliberately set. “Bringing the mass-murdering arsonists to justice,” is how this theme is usually worded.  The prime minister and the state premier and the special commissioner (a retired police chief) all pander to this ‘find the villains” sentiment. Fanning the flames, as it were.

My totally uninformed guess is that virtually all of the fires were natural or accidental. The combination of extreme dryness, extreme heat (~50 celsius, or ~125 Fahrenheit), strong winds, and too much underbrush. But we need villains, so the focus is on arsonists. Sad, but weird, but understandable.

In Melbourne itself, there is limited acknowledgment of the tragedy on the doorstep. Everyone is reading the same newspapers, and watching the same 24-hour news coverage, but life seems to be going along pretty much as normal.

Who am I to say what normal is, though? We just got here.

Each shop and restaurant suddenly has a can on the counter, collecting money for the relief effort. The waitstaff at the restaurant where we just had dinner is donating this week’s tips.

Adding to the strangeness, it is cold and cloudy in Melbourne. On Saturday, the temperature hit its highest level ever recorded, just under 50 degrees celsius (127 Fahrenheit). Today it was 16 celsius (61 Fahrenheit), and everyone was wearing jackets and boots. The wind was strong, as you might guess, and apparently this gave new life to many of the uncontrolled fires.

So, we are sitting amidst the aftermath of a tragic disaster, but it doesn’t feel that way. We have had a minor tragedy of our own, the early miscarriage of a surprise pregnancy, so we have been focused on India’s health, and on our emotions. We knew we were pregnant for exactly two days. More on that subject later. It has been a strange and sad week.

Greetings from Melbourne! We arrived this evening after two long days in the car, driving down from Sydney. Australia is an enormous country, and we’ve just traversed one small corner of it.

I will write a post about our drive later. This post is about our last afternoon and evening in Sydney.

On Sunday we had a very nice lafternoon with a friend from business school and his family. Steve and Alison have a remarkably nice lifestyle in Sydney, living a five-minute walk from Manly Beach. After they cooked us lunch on the barbie, and we had a glass of New Zealand wine, we all went for a sunbath and a swim in the ocean. Very civilized. They and their kids seem as happy and healthy and comfortable as can be. They embody all that is good about Australia.

That evening we stayed in a controversial new resort in Manly called “Q Station.” The developers have converted the old quarantine camp -where the Australian health authorities once detained potentially contagious arriving passengers- into a conference facility and cultural appreciation center. It is a little bit like having a boutique hotel on Ellis Island. It is controversial amongst Sydneysiders because it is a hotel inside a park, and the country’s heritage was also somehow potentially jeopardized.

The physical setting for Q Station is off- the-hook beautiful. It is perched on the bluffs above Sydney Harbor, with spectacular views of the city and of the northern beaches and towns. Because Q Station is in the midst of a giant park, the long, low, yellow buildings are surrounded by forests and fields.

The guest rooms are built into the old bunk houses that used to hold scores of quarantined passengers. To give guests a flavor of the quarantine experience, many of the rooms do not have en suite bathrooms, requiring guests to share … just like in the old days. While we were waiting to go into our rooms, India used one of the old communal women’s bathrooms, which had not been renovated yet. Apparently it also had not been cleaned since the facility was used for quarantine (ie, maybe 30 years). She came back disgusted, wondering how far the authenticity of the quarantine experience would be taken.

Our rooms did have bathrooms, but the developers’ desire for us to appreciate the quarantine experience made our whole stay at Q Station a little weird and frustrating. For example, they took away our car keys, effectively stranding us at the hotel in the middle of a huge wildlife area, surrounded on three sides by water. We hiked (a long way) down to dinner in the old dining hall, where we were not given a choice of food. Everyone was served the same dish of bad chicken, bad fish, and bad minute steak. We walked to the windy beach, but got kicked off almost immediately because it was sunset. Being in quarantine isn’t supposed to be fun.

There were several activities advertised on Q Station’s website: an “immersion theatre” production, a late-night ghost tour, a family ghost tour, a history walk. Unfortunately, none of them were being offered on the day we were there. Huh?

We were supposed to be staying in renovated cottages, so that we could all be in the same place, but the renovations are several months behind schedule.

Finally, all of the staff members were absurdly good looking young Brazilians, who spoke little English. I’m not sure how that emulated the quarantine experience, but it made our stay a little weirder.

We were glad that we had only booked a single night at Q Station. All of us were relieved to get our car back and head down to Manly for breakfast.

It did not surprise us (after the fact) to find out that we were basically the only guests on Sunday night. The site is so spectacular, and what they are trying to do has some real merit. They need to work out some of the kinks, though.

Greetings from Manly (the place, not the self-describing adjective). This very short post is about the wildfires in South Australia.

We are still in Sydney (more about that in a later post). We are having a late breakfast about 1,000 kilometers from where the wildfires are.

Today we are driving down towards Melbourne, but we will stay well east of the danger areas. It seems a little strange to be driving toward a page 1 disaster, but it is a huge country, 99.999% of which is not on fire.

We will write a longer post once we get Internet access. The plan is to stay overnight halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, breaking the ten-hour drive into two days.

We are glad to be getting out and seeing some more of Australia. The next few weeks we will be in pretty much continuous motion. We are also glad, though, that we will have several days in Sydney at the end of the month, before we head out to New Zealand.

CREEPY BUT FAMOUS FACE

Greetings from Bondi Beach!

A Tallulah’s suggestion, we spent most of today at Sydney’s famous Luna Park.  It is an amusement park located in North Sydney, just at the end of the Harbour Bridge, set magnificently right next to the water.

Luna Park is old school.  It was first opened in 1935, transplanted en bloc

from a park in Adelaide, after being chased out by that city’s residents.  Adelaide’s loss, I guess.  

In the intervening 73 years, Luna Park has been embroiled in countless lawsuits (primarily against nearby residents over noise and disruption), it has been in and out of bankruptcy a few times, and it has been closed for years on end.

Strange history for a pretty cool place.  Somehow the park does not seem to have embedded itself in the culture and fabric of the city.  Even today, a sunny Saturday in high summer, we basically had the place to ourselves. The city has some arrangement where it subsidizes any losses experienced by the private park operator.  My guess is that the taxpayers of Sydney write a check every year.

Tallulah is 104 centimeters tall, which made her exactly 2 centimeters too short for most of the big rides.  She generally hates when I call her “Shortulah,” or “Not-Very-Tall Ulah,” and I was careful to refrain from these nicknames today.  

She still had fun, I think, riding the littler-kid rides, and running around the “Coney Island” fun house with me.  The funhouse was a re-creation of what Sydneysiders had at Luna Park in 1935: 60-foot-high wooden slides that you rode while sitting in a burlap sack; a maze of mirrors; a Turkey Trot path where parts of the floor shimmy and shake underfoot; giant barrels, spinning in both directions, that you try to walk through.  Tallulah particularly liked riding the bumper cars, where she and I got to whomp her brother several times at high speeds.

Zola and I rode a series of nauseating, old-school “centripetal-force” and “hang upside down” rides.  Someone once told me that kids and adults experience these rides in different ways.  Some inner-ear development happens only during adolescence, and prior to that, kids are largely immune to motion-related dizziness and nausea.  Based on my observation today, this may be true.  ”Dad! That was awesome!  Let’s ride that one again!”

RIDING THE TANGO TRAIN

Overall, Luna Park was a win.  There was no waiting in line for rides, the kids had an absolute blast, it was nice being next to the harbor, and the whole adventure was inexpensive. Well, it would have been inexpensive if a traffic officer hadn’t been writing a huge parking ticket when we got back to the car, and if Zola hadn’t lost my sunglasses somewhere between “The Ranger” and “Big Splash.”  

We went to dinner down at the beach in the town of Coogee (pronounced with a hard ‘G’).  For the last few weeks, I have been entertaining myself and the kids while driving with an ongoing dialogue between fictitious Southern rednecks named Tinker and Buck.  Today I added a new character, Tinker’s friend Coogee.  Coogee just got fired from his job at the penitentiary, and was hoping that Tinker could get him on down the Piggly Wiggly.  India, being from Tennessee (and probably having dated someone named Tinker or Buck in high school) is not amused by any of this.

Quoting one of the guidebooks: “Sydney is a tart.  She dresses up fancy, and she likes to talk all about the opera house and the art museum.  On weekends, though, she likes to dance, knock back a bunch of drinks, and party.”  Based on the scene when we got back to Bondi Beach this evening, that seems like a pretty accurate description.  The streets and bars are packed, the music is tremendously loud, and beautiful,  young people seem to just be having fun.

After our week here, India and I agreed that we have never felt so old, so unfit, so unhip, and so … what’s the opposite of care free?.  And we feel this while we are living in the mobile Never Never Land bubble of the world-round trip.  Imagine how it would feel being here in the midst of my real life.

Bondi Beach may be the real Never Never Land.  It may also be the Paradise City that Axl Rose sings about.  

We have had a great time here.  

Tomorrow we are moving over to a new hotel in Manly, in the northern suburbs, and we are seeing some friends for a barbeque.  On Monday morning, we start the long coastal drive down to Melbourne, and we start exploring the rest of Australia.

Greetings from Bondi Beach!  As we hoped, yesterday we got our circadian rhythms back on track, and had a tremendous and exhausting day in Sydney.

India and I were both up early.  In a major change to household patterns and trip protocol, I went out for a run before her.  Our hotel (www.ravesis.com.au) is across the street from the center of Bondi Beach.  I ran left (north) to the end of the beach, and then south along the coastal path to Tamarama and Bronte Beach. Brutally hot, even at 7:30, but a pretty spectacular route.  

Sydneysiders are the best looking and most physically fit people in the world.  I am amazed at how many people are out swimming laps, running, lifting weights, riding bicycles, surfing.  Regardless of the type of physical activity, all of the women here seem to be wearing bikinis.  Most of the men look as though they stepped out of a BowFlex infomercial.  India has advised Tallulah that before she goes off to save the world, she should come to Sydney “to get fit, and date, date, date.”  Tallulah looked at her with confusion, perhaps concerned that Mom meant for her to do this now.

We drove down to Clovelly Beach, about 10 kilometers from Bondi to go snorkeling.  One of our South African emigre friends listed this as the “#1 must do activity” in Sydney.  The “beach” is really a narrow inlet about 200 meters long, with concrete platforms lining both edges, about a meter above the water.  The ocean end of the inlet is mostly blocked by an artificial (cement-block) reef, so the inlet ends up being a huge, very calm tidal pool.  Zola and I swam around looking at fish for a long time: big fish, little fish, fish of all colors.  Later, I swam out over the reef and into the open ocean, just for the childish thrill of watching the kelp and the rocks rush by as the waves washed me back into the inlet.  Fun with mask and snorkel.

From Clovelly, we went to the family beach at Coogee.  Tallulah finally got some sand toys, and alternated between making princess castles and preparing elaborate baked goods.  Zola and I exhausted ourselves bodysurfing in the small beach-break waves.  India sat on shore, reading the same Jay McInerney short stories that I just finished, and coming to the conclusion that men are cads.

In the early evening, I went back to the surf shop where we bought the snorkel gear for a “Stand-up Paddle Board” lesson.  Craig, the surf dude at the shop, said, “Actually, it idn’t really a lesson, mate.  But if yer drifting off to New Zealand, I’ll haul ya back in.”

I had watched a few SUP boarders in Cape Town, and was excited to give it a try.  Amidst all of the belly-lying surfers and boogie boarders, the standing paddlers look like serene kings of the water.  For some reason, I always think of the bad, old Chris Isaac song, “Don’t Pay the Ferryman.”

There was practically no swell at Bondi Beach, so it was a good day to learn.  I found out that it is harder than it looks, and that it is very good exercise.  After an hour, I managed to stay vertical most of the time, paddling around in the flat water 30-40 meters off the beach.  We did not try to surf, and if I broke my concentration to talk to Craig, I immediately fell in.  It was a fun end to the water day.

Today we have a bunch of errands to run, including shipping a lot of stuff back to Tennessee.  We will also get out and see some more of the city.  Sydney is definitely growing on us.

FINALLY!