The Seaton's descend

There has been much excitement in our house pending the arrival of Kate, Nick, Tom and Alice from Singapore. Carys has been counting down the number of sleeps till they arrive, and promising to share her toys and play nicely. Of course she did manage this on occasions, but it was mostly rufty-tufty play in reality. Its funny how small children set themselves such high goals and have so little insight.

After a few days exploring Sydney, and the obligatory trip to the aquarium and zoo, we set off down the coast to Jervis Bay.


I'm now in countdown to returning home mode, so I treat every trip as the last opportunity to go somewhere. This meant I had to stop at several places of interest en route, and tick them off my list.

I loved the scenic route down the coast over the sea-cliff bridge (a concrete road built over the sea as the cliff kept collapsing). Alice didn't particularly like travelling in the car, so I don't think she approved of my route planning.

The viewpoint on the right is where Lawrence Hargrave developed and experimented with box-kites, monoplanes and engines which led to the development of the first planes. Today it is populated by hang-gliders and paragliders, in a way that seemed very fitting.



The next stop on my tour was Kiama and the blow hole there. We were able to put our kids in matching raincoats and experience the crashing "whumph" of the jet of seawater propelled out of the rocks.

It was with a sigh of relief we all arrived at our holiday home/youth hostel in Jervis Bay. We quickly overcame our initial disappointment over the finishing touches of the accommodation, and lapped up the location along a huge stretch of golden sand with real crashing waves, but most importantly a trampoline. Carys and Tom were able to try body boarding, and Howard was able to practice aeriel stunts involving 3 frisbees. Needless to say, not all the frisbees survived.




On the final day we had a really surreal experience. We tramped through the national park for 2Km to a beach. It was a beautiful bay, with clear green water, few humans, but thousands of dead birds strewn out along the beach. Presumably washed there on the tide, it was all a bit smelly and sinister. If you can make out any black dots in the photograph they are all the corpses.