Hard to believe it’s January 2025! It was 2 years ago at this time that the immigration lawyers in Australia were guiding me through the work visa application process – and strongly advising me to not quit my job in Canada or sell my house until the visa was confirmed. But I had already done both 🙂
We had a fabulous Christmas Day with Rod, Llew, Kev, and Jo at Rod and Llew’s place. There was lots of eating, swimming, bocce playing, cornhole playing – and a few beverages may have been had too.
I guess by “swimming”, I meant floating under the shade of the umbrella with beers in hand 🙂 These guys have a tough life.
We spent Boxing Day with Geoff, Sharyn, Rob, and Barb at Geoff and Sharyn’s place – more food, drinks, and games! Geoff and Sharyn’s daughters did a fun Christmas Music Bingo and I was on a winning streak! My prize was a very cool Christmas “tiara” that I will definitely be bringing out every Christmas:
Some random pictures and thoughts from the last few weeks:
I mentioned awhile back that I was excited to purchase art from local artists. The first was an amazing sunrise photograph taken from Baga on the road to Rockhampton. And I picked up the second one a month or so ago, an amazing painting from local artist and friend Catherine Boreham:
I just love this painting of pandanas palms in front of the ocean! We have it on an easel on top of a dresser in our bedroom so I get to wake up and look at it every day. Speaking of the ocean, the portion of the Pacific where we are is called the Coral Sea. When we were watching my favourite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, we realised that when Jimmy Stewart’s character talks about all the exotic destinations he plans to visit, he includes the Coral Sea!
I don’t have a photo because this darned bird is very good at hiding, but I love listening to him. The Pacific Koel has a few calls but the one I hear all the time is “woo woo woo woo” with rising intonation. I hear it so regularly but can never find the bird. A couple months ago I caught a glimpse of him flying by but only enough to see that he’s all black and smaller than a crow. Fortunately our Aussie friends were able to identify the call for me and coincidentally, a week or two later, Hugh and I went for a walk on a beach we hadn’t been to before, and we saw a few of these black, red-eyed birds hanging out near the beach! Would be neat to see a female – if you click on the link above, you’ll see that the females are very funky looking.
The beach we went to was further north along Farnborough Beach, in the Bangalee area, and we hadn’t realised this was a beach that vehicles are allowed on. I took this photo looking from the beach back toward land but we didn’t stay long as it wasn’t as fun walking when there were SUVs and utes driving up and down.
We saw this while in Rockhampton one day last week – you know you’re in a mining area when…
In the category of smaller vehicles, our friend Rod treated himself to a very spiffy golf cart. He drives it onto the trailer and then tows it to the golf course. It’s very flash!
(While Hugh is taller than Rod, the height difference in this photo is exaggerated as our driveway is steep so Hugh is on higher ground and I’m even higher up to take the photo.)
“Flash” means something like “fancy” or “spiffy.”
Another new Aussie word is “shout”, as in “It’s my shout” (it’s my round) or “I’ll shout you a drink” (I’ll buy you a drink).
We’re watching curling from Lloydminster right now:
When we catch games live, Hugh posts like he did here and the commentators always get a kick out of people tuning into curling from Australia 🙂 We’re watching the C Qualifier right now and it looks very cold on the ice – some of the guys are wearing “beanies” (that’s what they call toques here).
We went into Rocky last week to do some errands, including going to Officeworks (equivalent of Staples). As we were approaching the store, we noticed that the parking lot was full to overflowing, as were all the streets around it. I wondered if there was an event going on somewhere nearby because I couldn’t figure out why so many people would be rushing to buy office supplies in Boxing Week sales. Well, it’s because it’s back to school time here! I keep forgetting the school calendar here – the new school year starts at the end of January.
We continue to love Aussie humour – it’s even on kleenex boxes:
And while this looks like humour, it’s actually true:
Hugh has played this course in North Rockhampton and it’s a very busy course – he thinks this is just a ploy to reduce the number of players 🙂 But still, as Joanne pointed out, it’s good incentive to keep your shots on the fairway!
This morning, Hugh went to the farmers’ market and he parked outside a house with banana trees. I’ve seen banana trees around but haven’t seen bananas growing yet. How cool is this having bananas growing in your front yard!
We went to the Capricorn Caves just after the winter solstice. There is a shaft in one of the caves where the sun streams in from about 11:50am to 12:10pm during the solstice when the sun is directly overhead. It was very cool to see!
When the tour guide would hold different coloured fabrics under it, the whole cave would change colours:
And the guide gave us a disco ball to hold underneath:
We also saw the exoskeleton a spider had shed – still hanging from a silk!
Check out the size of these tree roots reaching deep into the caves:
Oh yes – that’s me with my “mahCRAWmee” water bottle holder 🙂
Here is Hugh squeezing through a narrow passageway in the caves:
And some info on the bats that live in the caves:
On New Year’s Eve, we hitched a ride over to Great Keppel Island with our friends Jamie and Bettina. They have a “stinky boat” (a power boat – called stinky by the sailing crowd :)):
Very cool instrument panel in the boat!
They dropped us off at Kev and Jo’s boat and we spent NYE anchored off Svendsen’s Beach. I was a bit nervous to go swimming at first as there was a fatal shark attack over at Humpy Island (on the south side of GKI; we were there earlier in 2024 with our friend Melbourne Rob) on Dec 28, and non-fatal attacks a couple hours north and a couple hours south in recent months. But then you realise that the chances of a shark attack are really low here as long as you’re not swimming at dawn/dusk (feeding time) or surrounded by bait (the man who was killed at Humpy Island was spearfishing, which is typically safe too, but does increase risk due to blood from fish). There’s no reef at Svendsen’s Beach, so nothing to attract many fish, so that was a good spot to swim safely after my initial hesitance.
Jo and Kev took us for a hike on the island from Svendsen’s Beach over to Butterfish Bay:
Saw a gum tree without its bark on the way – looked like concrete!
So many beautiful views along the way:
But then wow, check out the view as you arrive at Butterfish Bay:
Looks like a postcard! At the huge dune you can see in the distance, people take their boogie boards and toboggan down it – but not in the summer, the sand is WAY too hot right now. We wandered down to the beach and quickly got our feet into the water:
We spent NYE on the beach, at that gathering area I told you about last time. Kev brought his guitar and kicked off a night of strumming and singing – seems like sailors are talented musicians too! We watched the Sydney fireworks at midnight back on the boat. Well, Sydney is an hour ahead of us this time of year, so the networks do a tape delay of the fireworks for those of us in Queensland :). Some brave souls also set fireworks off on the beach (fireworks are illegal here) – reminded me of NYE at Topsail with April, Ray, Kevin, and Cathy!
We stayed on the boat overnight – how nice it is to sleep with the gentle rocking of the waves! I happened to wake up around 5:30am and took this photo through the window in our room:
On New Year’s Day, we did a circumnavigation of Great Keppel Island. We had a couple signs of good luck for 2025. I saw a stingray jump way out of the water, twist in the air, then dive back in – magnificent! And we anchored for lunch and swimming over at Long Beach (incredibly white sand) and saw a sun halo:
So I think 2025 is going to be a great year!
Last night we went to The Station to have dinner with Rob, Barb, Anthony, and Vicki. Anthony was playing drums for an awesome local band:
Hopefully the videos will play better in my posts – I was running out of storage space for this blog site so I purchased a hosting package with a lot more room. Not sure if that will help or not. But if the videos don’t buffer well, just let them do their stilted thing and once it’s done, click Play again and it should be smooth the second time.
OK, my next blog post will likely be in early February. We’re taking a vacation this month! Very excited, but we’re a bit worried about these frigid temperatures where we’re going:
Yes, I know, I should be embarrassed to be a Canadian, but when it gets down to 20C here, it feels quite chilly to me now! So seeing lows in single digits is downright frightful. We’re digging out our Canadian clothes to pack as these temps will require jumpers and beanies! Oh, we’re flying on QANTAS – do you know what QANTAS stands for? Check out the history here. I’ll keep you in suspense as to where we’re going that is so darned cold.
Happy New Year, everyone!