Easter Weekend

Happy Easter to all! Easter weekend in Australia is a big event. The Friday before and the Monday after are public holidays which means everyone gets busy with traveling and having barbeques. Travelers queued up by the thousands at 5 AM at the airport to catch their flights and petrol prices went up fifteen cents a liter. I rode my board Friday and Saturday and caught some great waves. On Saturday night we went to the fireworks show down by the beach. And then on Sunday one of my coworkers had a barbeque where several families from work enjoyed the day having wine and champagne, an easter egg hunt, and rugby on the beach. Cheers for now!

Boogie boarding

Fireworks at South Cronulla Beach

Fireworks at South Cronulla Beach

Fireworks at South Cronulla Beach

Sunrise in our front yard

Cronulla Shark Island Challenge

Every year there is an event in Cronulla called the Shark Island Swim Challenge. There are two separate races. The first race goes for 1 km, starts at the Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club and goes out around some buoys that look way too far out from shore. The second race also starts at the life saving club, and goes all the way out around Shark Island. This second race is over 2 km. Needless to say I didn't do either race, but I managed to eat a nice bacon and egg roll and snapped a few photographs. Over 1600 people participated in both races including some folks from Blue Water (Blue Water is the joint venture that is designing, building, and operating the desalination plant). Blue water was kind enough to set up a table at the race and sponsor drinks and brekkie for any interested employees. For anyone who is interested in where the heck it is that we live and where the race was, here are the coordinates you can enter into Google Earth:

Our apartment: 34° 3'3.89"S 151° 9'14.41"E

Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club: 34° 3'20.42"S 151° 9'16.64"E

Shark Island: 34° 3'35.69"S 151° 9'34.54"E

Cronulla Park and the life saving club

Blue Water Participants

The race begins

The race begins part 2

The winner approaches the finish line

We hired a surf board from the local surf shop and headed for the beach. We arrived at the beach and to our astonishment the sea looked like glass. A local commented that it was the calmest conditions she had seen in 15 years. This turned out to be ideal for beginning surfers! Jack was the first to give it a go and was quite skilled at balancing and had a good couple of runs. Steffi, meanwhile, got dumped off the boogie board and was nursing her bruised ego and side. She quickly recovered and took her turn at balancing and jumping off the surf board into the waves. It was then my turn...I soon learned that balancing on a board was much more difficult than it looked and standing up required a great deal more upper body strength than I posess. I did have a good time entertaining Mike and riding in a wave or two flat on my belly. I will likely stick to the boogie board in the future. There are no pictures of Mike this day, but we did get some good ones a few weeks back when he took a real surfing lesson! Check them out as well!

Wine Country

We went to wine country last weekend. Australia is world renowned for its shiraz, so of course we bagged a few bottles. The best part wasn't even the wine, but we finally saw wild roo's for the first time in 6 months. Here's proof...



Cheers