A quiet few weeks

Dianne's daughter, Jessica, gets fired into the grog

Its been a bit quiet down here over the last few weeks with not much happening at all. I've been out to a couple of suburban reserves in search of Swift Parrots but with no joy yet. The last two Sundays I've also been back to watch my girls play football. I'm not the coach this season due to my mid-week touch footie commitments but I've ended up running the line for the last two Sunday matches.

Sneaky Pete sorts out some kangaroo

A couple of Fridays back we also had a group BBQ and sports day down at Bronte beach. These are always a bit of a laugh with footie, cricket and boules on the menu this time. The food was also tip-top with the boss providing some excellent flathead which had been marinated in some sort of mango juice. Sneaky Pete did some awesome kangaroo and Jose, the visiting Spanish professor, sorted us out with Spanish omelette and sangria.

The boss unleashes his arm ball

More cricket

Anzac Day car camping

No getting across that!

Miserable

Last weekend was the Anzac Day long weekend and so, determined not to waste a public holiday this time, I headed north for a spot of car camping in the Barrington Tops National Park. We decided to try to beat the rush and left on Thursday evening. We drove north through torrential rain and arrived at the Barrington Tops after dark. After negotiating a couple of dodgy fords we came across a third one which was just ridiculous and so we decided to camp by the roadside and wait for the water to go down over night. This was the sensible thing to do as we later found out that tragically someone had attempted to drive in further and was swept away and killed. In the morning, however, the ford was even deeper and the continuous rain throughout the night had turned our little camping area into a swamp.

Top trailer park!

All our gear was wet and with no sign of the rain stopping we decided to head back to Sydney. That was a good plan until we found that the fords we'd crossed the day before were now themselves impassable. And so we were totally stuck in the pouring rain between fords. Misery then set in. That was until a drunken local showed up in his ute and told us about the caravan park just through the fields and over the hill along the flood detour track! Unbelievable. And so, after spending much of the day sitting in the car doing nothing we found ourselves in a trailer park with a rented caravan and a hot shower. Things picked up from there.

Nice again

The weather cleared by Saturday and we had good bush-walking despite the massive number of leeches (just like last time!) and a few river crossings over swollen creeks. Spotlighting at night turned up several Tawny Frogmouths and Brush-tailed Possums and also a couple of Ring-tailed Possums (I think) and a Koala! By Sunday the water had completely gone down and we drove out with no difficulty.

Tawny Frogmouth

Koala with crazy eyes

Brush-tailed Possum