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Published: November 20th 2005
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Out on the Ferrry
Uptop the ferry in a strong wind. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
I am starting to think Lewis Carroll wrote that with Australia in mind and he just wasn't sure what the official name were for the various things that bit and had claws.
Early this past week Abby got attacked by a horde of ‘sea lice’. These feisty organisms are really nasty little worms that live in birds, and then jump ship to snails where they do the whole egg/larvae thing and then they look for another bird to invade. Sometimes, worm larvae not being so bright, they mistake a baby’s leg for a duck or seagull and bingo - you have sea lice. They don’t stay on you like lice in America - but after they bite and decide you aren’t a duck, they leave a nasty welt. So Abby, who had spent a full hour collecting snails in a puddle during low tide, was the best Thanksgiving treat ever for these little beasties. Thankfully, and really rather miraculously, the hundreds of bites all over her legs don’t seem to bother her at all. They are supposed
Lorikeet
We have a huge flock of Lorikeets outside our windows each evening - they are rainbow colored wild parrots. to itch like crazy so we are so grateful that she never caught on to that.
Despite the Lewis Carroll poem, to be perfectly honest, and before everyone decides that there are simply too many scary creatures down here, you should know that sea lice are the same thing we call ‘duck rash’ back at Lake George and in other bodies of water. It’s a global problem. If there are birds and snails there are sea lice. Not that I've ever had a single sea lice bite in America . . . .
At any rate, until the bites subsided we needed to do non-beach/pool/puddle-full-of attack-parasites, type activities. So we decided to finally take a ferry. Sydney has a ferry system as complex as their bus and train system. You can hop on a ferry and end up in all sorts of places throughout the Harbor. But, because Bondi is an ocean facing town, we do not have a ferry stop and there has never been a reason to take one. In order to get anywhere out of Bondi, busses and then trains are your only option.
That said we really wanted to take a ferry, so
we created a loop whereby we took a bus to the train and the train to the city where we walked to the wharf simply to take a ferry to another town where we caught the bus back home.
Yes that is a lot of public transportation, which means, yes that’s a lot of appeasement ‘biscuits’ for a certain one year old, but it was really quite fun. First of all on the walk down to the wharf at Circular Quay, we passed by Les’ office building. It was fairly early Saturday morning and there was virtually no traffic in center city. Perfect for . . . filming a movie! In fact they were filming Superman Returns which will be released in America probably next summer. What was most interesting to us about seeing the scene (no actors were on site) was that all the cars were facing right and had steering wheels on the left side. That actually stood out to us, which shows you we are slowly acclimating to the Left-Rules-Road.
After we walked past that set, we walked no more than a block when we found ourselves walking through what at first looked like props and left over junk from the movie production. But when we walked past a lady holding a jumbo credit card, as in three feet by two feet, something felt off. Then we passed a man holding another coffee table sized card and a lady sitting down next to one. All the while people were giving us strange looks. As if we were out of place! We weren’t the ones holding credit cards designed for giants! And then it dawned on us - we were walking thru the set of a commercial.
Well we hustled out of the way after passing about 10 different colossal-card carrying actors. A production assistant smiled at us with a, ‘no worries’ sort of look and we just kept on walking. Next year we’ll all have to watch for Les’ office building in Superman Returns, and our family looking dazed and confused in the middle of a credit card commercial.
Finally we made it to the wharf and hopped on our ferry. It was a 25 minute ride and it was great. Well worth the transportation tangle to get there. From the water you really get such a sense of how big Sydney is in every direction. All the various bays and inlets had shorelines covered in homes and businesses. And there were water taxis and private boats and freight and cruise ships all over the place. It was a hectic out there. We also were able to see many of the same cliff side promenades that we’d hiked to in past excursions - pinpointing exactly how insane we’d been each time we believed we were just off on a short walk.
With the Opera House and Harbor Bridge always in view it was a great ride - - windy and deliciously fly-free.
Our ferry made stops in Double Bay, a ritzy upscale little boutique community (perhaps better known by my generation as the place where Michael Hutchinson, lead singer of INXS, killed himself), Rose Bay, home of the starting point of our never-ending death march into the hinterlands of gated communities that first month we arrived, and finally to Watson’s Bay, our new favorite town from last weekend.
We grabbed some drinks at the bay-side pub in Watson’s Bay and gave Abby lunch. The lorikeets took over a few trees in the park and we managed to get some really great shots of them. And then we hopped onto another bus and headed back.
All in all our little circle of transportation took us about three and a half hours, but it was a lot of fun and well worth it to get out onto the Harbor and take a breather from the beach, rock pool and any potential frumious Bandersnatchs lurking beneath the water.
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great grand parents
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what a day
EsandLesand abigail What a fun dy youy hd and what a pleasure to see you all. Its hard to believe our little girl is gotten to be a little girl and do longer a baby,what a beautiful family..so nice that you think of us..Its a real treat to see yoou what a beautiful familly a repeat LOve Grama and grandaddy xxxxoooo ,