Our week last week: friends, fun, Canberra and an attempt at golfing.

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We know we’ve been a bit slack with the blogging but it turns out it makes a difference when you don’t have easy internet access. Sorry about that. We write our blogs most of the time in Word and then publish them online when we can. We don’t have too much of an excuse for last week: we were pretty blog-lazy.

I have to say thanks to all of you commenting on our blogs, we love it!

It was a beautiful week in Sydney last week and spent our time golfing (well, if you call 3 holes in 1 hour golfing), relaxing, eating out and plain ol’ enjoying the sun! Highlights of our week were visiting with friends we hadn’t seen in ages. We had dinner at a fabulous wine bar called DeVine in Sydney with Treen and Lanesy—so good to see them!! A bottle of very nice Chateauneuf-du-Pape (yes, we skipped out on Aussie wine for one night only) rounded off the evening perfectly.

The weekend was brilliant as well as we travelled down to Canberra to visit Ree & Kanch…and meet Ethan! It was wonderful to spend time with them again: felt just like old times in London. And how can we describe Ethan? It’s too difficult, he’s just the sweetest thing ever. Between us he was not left alone and loved every second of it.

Canberra itself is just as everyone had described: not much of anything. But Maja and I did do the tour of the parliament building, so we can say we did see the sights. Maja and Steve had us read the Canberra chapter in Bill Bryson’s book on Australia before we went and we suggest you do the same if you want to know anymore about it, it’s amusingly accurate.

I’ll let the pictures in this blog do most of the talking, we’re having the best time ever!!

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Photos

Meet "Bells"
Bells is one of the neighbourhood cats we like to play with. He's a friendly one.

Meet "Smudge"
Smudge doesn't like to be petted but we talk to him anyway. (just found out his real name is Lord, but we prefer our name)

Meet "C.C."
We've talked about C.C. before. She's still clingy and actually just snuck in the house now as I'm writing this.

Nice view on our usual walk to Manly
Please note that we are still in the dead of winter here.

Cockatoo at Manly
They're quite friendly here and not afraid of people getting close.

Sometimes we're crazy
We decide to walk home from the seamstress's house because it's 10km and we really need some exercise.

Really flippin' crazy.
Turns out the nice "walk" through the green bit is a highway. Officially the worst walk ever. Good thing a kangaroo didn't jump on us.

Our first golfing attempt.
Looked like losers taking pictures but we couldn't resist. Don't judge on the technique in this photo please. We're still beginners!

Shaney
It really did take 1 hour for 3 holes. Our next lesson is driving so hopefully that will help!

The Big Sheep
Australia has "Big Things" all over the country and Goulburn (Ree's hometown) has the Big Sheep!

Look at what we found!
This means that someone (perhaps a very distant relative?!) was awarded the Victoria Cross and a rest area was named after them.

So this is Ethan.
First of many pictures.

We love Charlie too
Shane and Kramer tuckered him out!

Maja and her favourite baby
It was nice when she let the rest of us play with him. :o)

Canberra
Shane and I were up early and went for a walk across the Burley Griffin man-made lake.

Comments

[Paula]

Big sheep
Sorry, but the Big Sheep looks like Jabba the Hutt. Perhaps George Lucas visited Australia before he made the Star Wars movies??! ha ha. I think there is a big Kielbasa in Alberta. Yup, here is a blog about more "Big Things". Too funny! http://jamesbrownontherails.blogspot.com/2006/05/day-trip-big-things-of-alberta.html