Now before you get too excited, no, we did not go to Botany Bay today - too much of a trek for us Brits this early on in our Aussie adventures. The reason I have started with this fact is because today we were struck by the beauty of North Sydney and its coastline. Ignorantly, I had always assumed Australia to be a very dry and sparse place. When we had visited Australia back in April 2013, Nathan and I had visited further South of NSW and here the flora was impressive but it lacked the variety of England's beautiful fields, forests and meadows. I have been very pleasantly surprised at the variety of wildlife here. In addition to the expected palm trees and eucalyptus trees, we have seen all manner of plant life - including oak trees! Now that, I did not expect! The colours are stunning.
Anyway, enough of me being old and boring! Today we decided to take the new car for a spin. I'll put a picture of her lower down for those of you who are interested in cars!
We decided to take a drive to Knox Grammar school, to see how long our drive to work will be. Well, it was a whole 10 minutes. If I wasn't nervous about starting at Knox, I certainly am now. It is even more impressive in the flesh than on its website. It is absolutely huge and extremely posh looking. What will they think of me and Nathan ? Will our accents endear us to them or annoy them? Will they even be familiar with the lyrics of Knees up Mother Brown or Chas and Dave's Rabbit? How much Dickens can an Australian lad handle?
We then drove onto see some of the coastline. We spent an hour at Dee Why beach, which was gorgeous. Golden sands tickled by sapphire blue waves, breaking with ivory white froth. I would like to say that I am exaggerating to simply make you jealous but that would be a lie. It really was phenomenal. We walked the stretch of beach and then stopped off for an ice cream.
Next stop, Palm Beach. For the Home and Away fans, this is the beach filmed for the series at Summer Bay. See piccies below. If possible, this was even more picturesque. The sands were more golden and the sea more blue. In fact, Nathan even took his shoes and socks off to paddle!
Amusingly, the girls got a little wet when a rogue wave came at them from behind. Nathan told them off - after all, he had warned them not to get wet because we would be getting in the car soon. Couldn't they even do that? I am sure that they were smugly satisfied when the waves, seemingly in sympathy with the girls, galloped up to Nathan and soaked his shorts!!
We stopped off at a café here, for lunch. Nathan had an Asian dish with noodles, Becky and I had a lemon and sweet chili chicken roll with salad and Erin had chicken and guacamole on sourdough bread. Poor Erin discovered that she hates sourdough bread today. If I was a nice mother, I would have swapped with her but I cannot stand guacamole and instead, I watched her as she did an extremely good impression of the world's slowest sandwich eater. meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed my chicken and salad. Still, it is all good character building - well that is what I am going to tell myself anyway!
We took another walk along the beach, drooling at the multi million dollar houses on the way. May be we could afford a beach hut???
On our return to the hotel, we had all turned a lovely shade of pink. Becky, in particular, seems to be pulling off a pretty convincing impression of a boiled lobster. The weather here is crazy; it is so inconsistent. We had a couple of hot days when we first arrived, followed by 2 or 3 very overcast days (jeans and t-shirt weather). Today started off fairly warm and got hotter and hotter as the day progressed. The breeze is lovely and cool so it is extremely pleasant but clearly we have burnt easily.
Blue Mountains tomorrow!!!
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