YellyElly

After our little road trip in November, we were planning a longer adventure for our two-week Christmas holiday. But as the time neared, we decided we could really use a proper break and lucked out with a last-minute booking for two full weeks at a holiday park on the NSW coast, just south of Batemans Bay. The campsite sits just over the dune from the beach and is ideally located for a little R & R.

So, on the morning of the 24^th, we took off not quite as early as we’d hoped and arrived 10 hours later. We were too tired to examine the beach after setting up our tent, but we made that our first priority (after coffee and a visit from Santa) on Christmas morning. It was definitely worth the drive! Barlings is a long calm beach with more beaches either side of it and mountains in the background. Can’t complain.

Employing the “when in Rome” approach, we celebrated Christmas Ozzie style and threw some sausages on the communal barbie for Christmas dinner. It was a bit less crowded than we’d expected and everyone seemed to have brought their own equipment, so again we lucked out with access to the BBQ.

By New Year’s Eve we were feeling pretty relaxed and getting the hang of slathering up in sunscreen and spending the day on the beach. We were so relaxed that we may have been in bed by 9:30pm on NYE. We didn’t completely neglect our celebratory duties though. NYE was spent on the beach (where else?) with a bottle of bubbly, some cheese, and some grapes taking in the sunset and saying goodbye to 2011.

The rest of the holiday comprised of sitting on the beach, swimming at the beach, walking along the beach, and visiting other beaches. The exception was a day out to a little former gold mining village to check out the wares and legendary fudge.

Probably the most excitement came from our few encounters with the wildlife. Steve evicted a huge spider from the car one night and a Goanna (a very big lizard – 2 meters) visited the campsite another day. We watched a commotion heading our way across the campsite as the big guy did his rounds. We found out he is a local, and is called Stumpy after losing his tail to a car, poor thing.

Meg also found excitement in watching the neighboring campers set up all their crazy gear, but that’s another post coming soon.

All in all, it was a great holiday and we came back feeling much more relaxed and refreshed.

If you had a television in England in the 90’s, chances are that you were exposed to the cult TV show that is ‘Neighbours’ – a soap opera set in suburban Melbourne. Brits in Melbourne often make the pilgrimage to the street on which it is filmed and as an added bonus, you can meet the stars of the show on a specially oganised night at a pub in St. Kilda. A British friend of ours decided that this was what she wanted to do for her birthday so it was a good excuse to finally go check it out. We got to meet three ‘stars’ including the legendary Dr. Karl Kennedy, whose band entertained everyone afterwards with an ‘interesting’ selection of covers.

Poor Meg was the only one in our group (possibly all of OZ) who had never seen Neighbours and was bemused by the whole thing. At the end of the night Dr. Karl dedicated a song to “the only person he had ever met not to have seen the show” (who could that be?). All in all it was cringe worthy, but good fun all the same.

After a long day of customer service training on Friday, I turned on my phone to find a message from Steve saying, “Let’s go camping tomorrow! I bought a tent.” Well, why not? So we packed up some gear and took off down the Great Ocean Road early on Saturday morning.

We ended up stopping halfway between Lorne and Apollo Bay at the Kennett River Holiday Park, where the koalas are – not a bad place to spend a couple of days. Our little tent proved to be an excellent purchase and I think it will see many more adventures.

While there, we took a walk up a river and I got the opportunity to discover the joy of leeches… Let’s just say they freaked me out enough to drop my pants while standing on a boulder in the middle of the river to be sure I’d gotten them all off. Seriously, yuck. At least I got a nice picture of Steve sitting on the boulder while they were stealthily crawling up my pants. (The boulder was thankfully leech free. – Steve)

I wasn’t going to miss out on stuffing two years in a row (not that our pumpkin and spinach pizza wasn’t tasty last year) even if it was a few days late. There was no way I was going to manage a full Thanksgiving dinner on a work night without convincing the Australians that I [...]

The weather was looking good this weekend so we took the Gran Barina out for a spin down to Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula. It’s a pretty place for a daytrip and as always the water was crystal clear. Seeing as the sun was out, we grabbed an ice cream in the town and walked [...]

Around mid-afternoon the Melbourne media started telling everyone that they might want to head home from work before the storm to end all storms descended on the city. These things have a habit of causing flash flooding and hail stones the size of golf balls. With the storm coming in off the bay, I pedaled [...]

With a four-day weekend to play with thanks to the Melbourne horse racing cup, Meg and I decided to put the car through its paces with a road trip. I was keen to see how far we could get in two days before having to turn around. So we headed off eastwards towards the southeastern [...]

The Queen came to Melbourne today, and seeing as I had some time on my hands, I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet her and charm her into letting me into her country. She did wave at me, so that’s progress, right?
Conveniently, she was headed for Government House, which is in our [...]

We’ve finally got all the paperwork sorted out for our little barina after some adventures with a dodgy mechanic and his friend the legit Chinese mechanic. And, after inspiration from Clint Eastwood, Steve has dubbed it the “Gran Barina”.
This weekend the Gran Barina took us up to Warburton in the lush green mountains. We had [...]

Now that we’ve got wheels (four wheels, that is), one of our first weekend adventures had to be Bell’s Beach. Steve was itching to go see the “real sea” again, so we took off for a proper coastal walk.
When we got to the parking lot, there was a paraglider flying around just above our heads. We watched [...]