I’m back…
Well, I’m back at work now. I’ve spent the last couple of days catching up on all the jobs that had accumulated while I was going and ploughing through the massive amount of emails in my Inbox. The major percentage of these were spam. I am amazed at the amount of impotent men there must be out there because it seemed like every second ad was for ‘power erection’ pills. And the names of some of these people think are legitimate. My personal favourites were ‘Amore C. Furrow’ and ‘Overstepped S. Advisory’. I couldn’t think of better names if I tried.
My wife and I had a great time on our vacation. After playing a spectacular debut gig at a local pub (I intend writing about this separately), we spent the first few days of our holiday proper catching up on a few DVDs we hadn’t watched and preparing our house for our going away. A friend of ours house-sat for us but we wanted the place to look extra clean and tidy for her. Then it was packing bags, saying goodbye to our beautiful cat and hitting the road.
Our first stop was a wonderful area called Kangaroo Valley, which is about 2 hours southwest of Sydney. This area is absolutely beautiful. It is best described as a lush coastal valley nestled between some beautiful ranges (sounds like I took this from a tourist brochure but I didn’t). We stayed with a friend who lives down there. His place is on one side of the valley and has panoramic views right across and down the valley to some awesome escarpments. We sat on his balcony admiring the view, eating and drinking far too much and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
From there, we went further west to the Canberra (for those who don’t know, Canberra is Australia’s capital). All my family, with the exception of my parents, live there so visits are usually filled with running around trying to catch up with all my siblings and their families. As my wife is an only child, I used to wonder whether my family would overwhelm her. The reality is quite the opposite as she loves being part of a large family such as mine. We both particularly enjoy catching up with our wonderful, beautiful nieces and nephews. The few days we spend with them, however, can be particularly wearying. I have so much admiration for parents given the amount of energy required to keep up with children. We were both pretty drained by the end of the third day, let me tell you.
Then it was on to the real holiday part of our vacation. Forster is about 3 ½ hours north of Sydney, on the central coast of New South Wales. The area is known for its beautiful unspoilt beaches, lush littoral forests and spectacular bush walking. We fell in love with the country side.
We had booked ourselves to stay into a motel (very 70’s but comfortable and roomy). We arrived at about 6pm, checked in and went for a bit of a walk to familiarise ourselves with the area. While we were out, it started to rain. Not just spit, or drizzle, but rain. Then the rain got harder. And harder still. We ran back to the motel with fish and chips for dinner and listened to the torrential downpour outside. We both hoped the rain would stop by the next day. It didn’t.
The next day proved to be cloudy, wet and raining, off and on. While we were a little disappointed, we could only really laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. The temperature was quite warm and we were able to enjoy some of the bush and beach walks the area offered, even in the rain. We took a lovely cruise on Wallis Lake, which is really an estuarine system but has some very beautiful mangrove areas and some of the biggest oyster farms I’ve ever seen. But with all the walking in the rain we did, coupled with going in and out of air-conditioned buildings, by the end of the week, we both had caught colds, which just added to the humour of our situation. We had a great time and fell in love with the area, even to the point where we spent some time looking at real estate up there. The prices are still quite reasonable and it is the sort of place where we’d like to eventually retire.
We were also a little disappointed we couldn’t go swimming. There were a very large number of blue bottles or Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish in the water and we just couldn’t risk being stung. At one point, we went for a walk along a quiet beach where we saw literally thousands of these little nasties washed up. I’ve never seen so many in my life.
With all this, some might think we had a rotten holiday but the truth is far from it. We both enjoyed spending time with each other without the usual commitments. I think it is something all couples, whether they have children or not, should try and do as regularly as they can. We can both hardly wait for our next break and are already talking about what we’d like to do.
The last week of our holiday was spent at home again. We had various projects to keep us busy, particularly concentrating on de-cluttering our apartment. We don’t have a great deal of clutter, but we’ve been in the apartment for over three years now and there were areas where we needed to cut back and get rid of some of the accumulations. It felt really good to go through our bookshelves (we have four large book cases stuffed with all sorts of books). I also went through my home studio and got rid of a lot of bits and pieces I no longer used. It is a great process to go through and we are planning on doing it at least once a year from now on.
So, there is my holiday. Writing about it now, it feels like it was months ago as I’ve been very busy at work. There was some reshuffling of various positions around the office and I came back to find I had a couple of extra jobs I have to do from now on. Oh, the fun never ends...