Well, it’s been a month since my last blog entry and there are so many different things to tell you – I can’t think of a unifying theme for the title! So I just went with “goanna” because there are lots of critters in this post.
I think my last blog covered the first week of Hugh’s golf trip down south with Kevin, Phil, and Rhod from Yeppoon. Here’s the gruesome foursome:
And here are Phil, Kevin, and Hugh by Hogan’s Hole in Narooma, NSW where Paul Hogan did a funny cigarette commercial in the 70’s:
For their second week, they met up with 20 other golf buddies and stayed down in Rye on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. I’ve marked on this map where we live 8 hours north of Brisbane and where they were golfing south of Melbourne:
Apparently the Mornington Peninsula is gorgeous – of course I wouldn’t know because I was working while the retiree was golfing…
But at least Joanne, Llew, and I spent a Sunday arvo in Rockhampton, having lunch at the Boathouse overlooking the Fitzroy River and then going to see Rent at the Pilbeam Theatre:
The Fitzoy River made headlines this month because it has been selected as the site for rowing sports for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. The reason it made headlines is because the river tends to have crocodiles in it – but what a motivator that will be for the rowers to go fast 🙂
In other critter news, Hugh and I went for a walk along a couple tracks (“tracks” = trails) in Rosslyn Bay that we somehow hadn’t gotten to in the almost 2 years we’ve been here. Here is a map to orient you:
We live where I’ve marked a 1 at the top left. Our favourite beach for swimming is in between the spots I’ve marked with a 2 and 3 – about a 10 minute drive from our place. #3 is Bluff Point:
When you read the sign and see it’s just a 2.3 km round trip, sounds nice and easy! But what they don’t tell you is it’s non-stop climbing! I thought the track followed the lower section of the hill but no, it went to the top. So your heart and lungs die on the way up and your knees die on the way down. I may be exaggerating slightly, but we were both still out of breath when we got to the top. Definitely worth it though, amazing views! This is us standing near the top at point #3 on the map and looking back toward point #2:
Lots of warnings that you may fall head first over the cliffs:
Oh yes, I mentioned critters. Here is the critter we saw coming down from the top of Bluff Point:
This is some type of spider and the sun was hitting his orange parts, making him glow! Not huge, maybe 3″ toe to toe.
The next day we did the track at point #2, Double Heads. Still some climbing but much easier! This was the worst part and it was fine:
At one lookout point, you can see Fan Rock, named for the unique shape of the volcanic formations there:
And you can look back over to Bluff Point from there:
Funny, doesn’t look that big from this vantage point…
The track that the stairs in the photo above takes you to gives a terrific view of Rosslyn Bay marina:
Kevin and Jo live down there so I sent a text saying we could see their house and boat. They replied that Kevin got his observation glasses and was waving to us. This is how we learned that binoculars = “observation glasses”, except that you would say “binos” if you were stalking someone using observation glasses. Our friends supply us with endless useful Aussie knowledge 🙂 We also learned the phrase “from a rooster to a feather duster” from Kevin – meaning going from something great to something terrible, as in how Kevin’s card game was going that night 🙂 Oh, speaking of card games – there is a very bizarre variant of Euchre down here! You play with the 7’s and 8’s and you score with a 5 and 6 (first to 11 wins), and you deal in this funny way (Kevin dealt slowly so you could see the method):
OK, back to the critters on our walks this week! Lots of brush turkeys at both Bluff Point and Double Heads:
Not the most attractive of birds but their vertically-oriented tails always catch my eye.
After getting to the top of Double Heads, we found another track to Pebble Beach (no, Hugh, not a secret wormhole to California):
On our way to Pebble Beach, we happened across this fellow:
A goanna. He kept an eye on us and we kept an eye on him and all was good.
If I were to rename Pebble Beach, I would call it Rock Cove. The “pebbles” were large and difficult to walk on, so not much of a beach, but definitely a beautiful secluded cove:
We’d had high winds churning up the water the week before so it’s rather brown instead of its usual beautiful blue.
What we didn’t happen across on this walk was an area called the Labyrinth that Jo told us about afterward. It’s apparently a bit of a hidden entrance but if you find it, the track takes you to a maze! Will definitely head back to look for that. And hope that we don’t bump into a goanna while in the maze 🙂
After one of our walks this week, we decided to treat ourselves to coffee and scones at the new Keppel Bay Sailing Club cafe:
It was a very windy day; this is not a new hair fashion I am sporting 🙂 Ah, this brings me to another new Aussie phrase we learned: blow a dog off a chain. Last weekend, a few of us pickleballers went down to Keppel Sands, about 30 minutes south of here, to try out a brand new pickleball court at the caravan park there:
The surface is synthetic grass! Our friend Robyn is playing with Hugh here, against Cam and Gordon. The ball doesn’t bounce much on that kind of surface, but when it was “blow a dog off a chain” windy, there were plenty of other things to go wrong with the ball!
We hadn’t previously been to Keppel Sands. It’s a quaint little community with some amazing houses overlooking the ocean or the river as you see here:
Very nice community but it’s 30+ minutes from anywhere, so not very practical for our current needs.
Continuing with critters, how cute is this!
Haven’t seen a platypus in the wild yet but if we do, I hope we see some babies!
My sister sent me a video of a quokka – they would be equally cute to see! Only in Western Australia, unfortunately.
In the not cute category, I came home from work one day and saw what I thought was a gecko on the outside of our patio door. Nope, not a gecko, a locust! I think it’s a spur-throated locust and I suspect he and his family and friends were responsible for destroying a couple of our beautiful plants:
That night I was working in my office and he made an appearance on my window, showing off his underside:
At work the other day, I saw these birds:
I have not been able to identify them – Aussie friends, can you help? They were in a herd of about a dozen, long tails, and they weren’t remotely worried about me.
On the way to work that same day, I finally saw some brolgas! No photo as they were along the highway and I was driving. They were in a field where you’re supposed to see emus so at first I wondered if they were small emus, but their pink heads and long beaks were quite distinctive. Almost half emu, half bin chicken. Very neat!
In case you need a lorikeet fix, here are a couple in our bird bath:
And then we saw this itsy bitsy teeny weeny baby gecko in our garage the other day:
In the flora category, check out these 2 fun plants on the uni campus:
The red flowers on this one don’t look real, they’re very fuzzy! And then this leafy plant is ginormous:
To give you an idea of the size, the red pipes at the lower left come up to my shoulders.
This morning we went for a bike ride up Farnborough Beach:
Not a soul to be found at this end, despite being a gorgeous Easter Sunday. Anywhere the sand looks dark in the video above are the piles of little balls that tiny crabs throw up to the surface from the tunnels they dig. Yes, there are MILLIONS of them!
We saw a group of pied oystercatchers along the beach:
And a solo sooty oystercatcher:
Although I’m quite sure they were feasting on the crabs today, no oysters in sight.
Riding back, we saw a raptor of some sort keeping a couple border collies entertained:
He kept swooping in low and getting them chasing him, then off up high he would go again. No need to throw a ball to tire the dogs out when the raptor does the work for you!
This afternoon we popped down to Kemp Beach for a quick swim – perfect weather, both the air and water temperature were around 26C (after an unseasonably hot and humid March, the last couple weeks have finally cooled down and we’ve been able to sleep without even the ceiling fan running!). I finally bought a “rashie” – helps protect you a bit when snorkeling near the reef but mostly helps prevent sunburn:
The hill in the background is spot #2 on my walking track map earlier, Double Heads.
Speaking of coral, a couple weeks ago we were walking along the main beach after a few very windy days and we saw these along the edge of the ocean:
I thought it was some sort of coral that had washed ashore but it was actually just very thick bubbles!
And speaking of preventing sunburn, they don’t typically say sunscreen here, it’s “sun cream.” There’s a free sun cream dispenser down at the main beach – but it’s called sunscreen there:
In other Aussie lingo, our friend Toni sent us this:
I’ve taught you some of these already, but there are lots of new ones for you too! One word I’ve previously taught you is “dunny” for toilet. I was howling watching the Players’ Championship the other week because the commentators kept referring to Matt Dunstone as Dunny!
One Canadian word that isn’t used here is “skunked” as in when you get 0 points in a game. No skunks here, so that explains that. But if you score 0 in something here and there is alcohol involved, you may have to do a “nudie run” 🙂
In other news, not only is there a federal election in Canada right now, there is in Australia too. Elections happen every 3 years here instead of 4. And I think I’ve previously told you they do preference balloting here, so you are asked to rank your choices on the ballot. You can choose to just rank your first choice and leave the rest blank but you are encouraged to rank as many as you can. I like this method because every vote counts, unlike in the first past the post system in Canada. But the downside is that coalitions form and negotiations happen to keep parties in power, so you could end up supporting a party’s positions you didn’t want to support. I guess there is no perfect system!
Cheri, I keep doing a double take when driving to work and I see this election sign:
Obviously the photo doesn’t look anything like you but the similarity in the name catches my attention every time!
And then here’s an election sign fail:
I guess the people putting up these signs didn’t realise that other signs are moveable 🙂
I know the US tariffs are a big election topic in Canada (and to a lesser extent here too), but there was almost an international incident of epic proportion between Canada and Australia this week! Did you hear about the vegemite scandal in a Toronto coffee shop? Fortunately, it was resolved yesterday when Health Canada decided that vegemite was only a low risk to human health.
In other vegemite news (who ever thought you’d hear that start to a sentence!), there is a rocket start up here called Gilmour Space. While they build their rockets down on Gold Coast (south of Brisbane), their launch site is in Mackay, just a 5-hour drive north of here. They thought they would have a launch attempt in mid-March, but the cyclone in Brisbane resulted in them not being able to send staff up to Mackay and then regulatory stuff has been slowing things down since. There haven’t been rocket launches on Australian soil before so we’re pretty excited to see these guys get going! They’re like a very mini SpaceX and they have that sense of humour too – they are going to launch a jar of vegemite into space with their first launch 🙂
Speaking of Australian technology, did you know that wifi was invented here? Yes, by CSIRO. But my Dutch friends will be happy to know that the precursor to wifi was invented in the Netherlands.
I mentioned that we’ve been here almost 2 years and we hadn’t done those walking tracks. Another thing we hadn’t done is go to the cinema! Mostly because there’s rarely anything on that seems worth it. But this week The Correspondent came out and we love anything Australian actor Richard Roxborough is in (if you haven’t watched the series Rake on Netflix, it’s fabulous), so we decided to treat ourselves to the Gold Room at the Yeppoon Cinemas (every time I hear Gold Room, I think Solid Gold in Burlington, no, not the same thing :)). You get to drink wine and they have very comfy seats:
Speaking of alcohol, this post came up on social media the other week:
Fun fact – Hugh was Shawn & Ed Brewery’s first customer! He was biking by and they weren’t yet able to sell beer, but they had T-shirts made and Hugh bought one for each of us. We both still have them! So nice to see them doing so well, such a great addition to Dundas!
OK, I think that’s about it for now. As mentioned, we are approaching our 2 year anniversary here (our Aussie-versary as our clever friend Sharyn coined), so there will be another big party coming up soon. And as luck would once again have it, we happened to be at The Station the other Friday. We’d had an early dinner and were going to leave when we bumped into friends Kel, Glenn, Glen, and Deirdre and they twisted our rubber arms to stay for a drink. Well, a mom and daughter were selling tickets for a meat tray and as you know, Hugh has incredible luck buying tickets for meat-related raffles. He bought some tickets and so did our friend Kel. Guess what – Kel won! Kel is coming to our party, which is a “bring a plate” party (potluck) so Kel generously donated the meat tray as his bring a plate contribution!
It’s shaping up to be a great 2-year Aussie-versary party!
Happy Easter, everyone!