Two Drifters

Question: Where did January go?  Answer: In a lovely blur of family, lazy days at Rye and a week in Palm Cove, Far North Queensland. We had all the kids and partners and some of their friends at Rye until they all went back to work earlier in the month. I have forgotten how much food six (to a dozen or so) adults eat! Added to the holiday congestion that descends on the Mornington Peninsula every Christmas/New Year, I did feel a bit like I was relaxing in between supermarket visits!!! Also, a big group deciding what to watch after dinner is a minefield. Especially when there are a couple of voices very keen to watch the Big Bash which seemed to go on endlessly! I like cricket but Test cricket during the day followed by T20 at night is too much for me. Not whining….even though this reads like whining!! It was lovely to all be together. Our son, M, turned 30 so we had some celebrations for that too. Yes, I have a 30 year old child. How did that happen??!! Said 30 year old child and h...

                                                                    ^Dinner in Darlinghurst, Sydney Wow! What a month February has been! What a whirlwind! What a lot of opportunities I had and, after a Conference in Sydney, I now have. But I’ll get to that… Three trips, eight flights (nine if you count sitting on the plane at Learmonth [Exmouth] as we refuelled), five different accommodations, some time at home and some time at Rye. I think I am getting to the stage of having a travel bag permanently packed!! First up was the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Words do not do justice to the beauty of this place. But it was a trek to get there from Melbourne – fly to Perth and overnight there then fly to West Island (part of the Cocos group) via Learmonth. Also, wind back 4.5 hours (3.5 hours if ...

^Choosing a few photos for this month's blog entry made me realise this has been the month of the Queensland beach walks!! What a privilege to live in a country where there are such beautiful, unspoiled beaches which are also accessible to all. We started the month in Palm Cove. Our last group who stayed with us are a couple we have been friends with for almost 40 years! It was lovely to spend a few, relaxed days together. Dropping them off at Cairns airport on a Monday morning, we started the almost 3,000 kilometre drive home to Melbourne. I wanted to be home by the Friday as I had concert tickets booked for Melbourne for the Saturday night and it was Mothers’ Day on the Sunday. We had also been away for almost three weeks and we were less than four weeks away from a two month trip to Europe (sorry, that’s a lot of numbers!!) The upshot of all that is that we had no time to wind our way down the East Coast. It was basically point the car and drive. And drive. And drive. We have a ...

^What 56 looks like 😊 April started with Easter. Well, it didn’t really as Easter Sunday was 31 March but I’ll claim it for April. We had the extended family to Rye for lunch and the weather turned it on! The kids all stayed with us for the entire break which was lovely. Just after Easter, Andrew set off for Palm Cove. By car! He wanted to tow his boat and keep it at the local marina for a while. His Mum kept him company for the first couple of days. They parted company on the Sunshine Coast where one of her daughter’s (one of Andrew’s sisters) and her family are having a sea change for a year. He drove the last couple of days on his own and then had a few days fishing in beautiful weather and calm seas. Fillets of delicious coral trout were brought home and eaten at our next family “shindig” which was my birthday in mid April.  Andrew was away for about 10 days and I enjoyed the time to myself in Rye and then back in Melbourne. Easter signalled the last of the beautiful Autumn we...

30 September 2023…a day that will live in Infamy ha ha!! Not only was it our anniversary of finishing employment but it was the day that our beloved Collingwood won the AFL Grand Final. Collingwoooooooood (as the crowd chant goes!) WHAT. A.DAY!!  I have been lucky enough to attend three Grand Finals in my life – 1990, 2018 and 2023. I was 22 back in 1990 and only obtained a ticket because Andrew’s Mum had a work connection to Collingwood. Andrew had been to a few Grand Finals before 1990 and Collingwood had lost each of them so, when they won in 1990, he told me (repeatedly) how lucky I was! It was a fabulous experience. Little did I know that I would wait 33 years for a repeat! Collingwood was in a few Grand Finals between 1991 and 2009 but lost all of them. We had no money and/or small children so we watched them all on TV. In 2010, we were in Bali on a family holiday as we watched the Granny on the TV and were stunned when it ended in a draw. We arrived back in Melbourne before ...

I have been lucky enough to split February between two of my “happy places” – Rye on the Mornington Peninsula and Palm Cove in tropical, Far North Queensland. I am writing this from my balcony in Palm Cove overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is the wet season so we have had some rain most days but the weather is constantly warm – approximately 30 degrees Celsius – and it is warm overnight too. The long sleeve jacket was worn on the plane here a week ago and has not been worn since! The sea temperature has fluctuated between 27 and 28 degrees! Coming from Victoria where the sea is cool (to freezing!) on the hottest days, this is a real treat. The pool temperature at the apartment complex is decidedly chillier than the sea! It is stinger season (ie large box jellyfish swim freely in the ocean) but our apartment is opposite the stinger net. There are also full time lifeguards so it is a safe place to swim. My view from the balcony is through native Paperbark Melaleucas which are over 500 ye...