Dave & Dana in Australia

Well, I’m officially a surfer now. On Saturday morning I went out for a morning surf before Marisa and her friend Stu came out to Manly for the weekend. The waves were pretty big, and while catching one of them the wave dumped over me (broke heavily over the top) and I had a pretty good wipeout. While churning around in the whitewater my board conked me on the head and voila - 4 stitches later I have my first surf war-wound. Picture below:

The rest of the weekend was much less stressful. Our friend Marisa Edwards, who is visiting Australia for 3 weeks before heading down to Venezuela to teach for a year, and her friend Stu who is from Sydney came over to Manly for the weekend. The weather was great, we drove around the beaches and soaked in the sun (if in rather cool temperatures), stopped off for a good lunch, had a good dinner and a few drinks in Manly, etc. We also did the Spit bridge to Manly walk, which is always spectacular. Overall, lots of fun and good to see another familiar face.

Speaking of familiar faces, many of you will be seeing ours fairly soon! Six more weeks and we’ll be back for a visit.

This picture speaks for itself.

It was Canada day this past weekend, which curiously didn’t coincide with any public holiday down under. Unfazed, Dana and I headed two hours North of Sydney into the Hunter Valley to celebrate. Now, it’s not the Barossa valley, or Margaret River or any of the other really famous Australian regions, but it is home to some really fine whites and a few nice reds and, well, it’s really beautiful. We stayed a nice little inn and had a fantastic dinner on the Saturday night, and of course visited about a dozen vineyards tasting and buying bottles. Quite civilized really. Of course for one of those days I was wearing my Canada hockey jersey, so that took a bit of the classiness out of it.

Not a whole lot else to tell you all about. Dana was in Perth for a week on business and visiting with Dale, and I used that time to catch up on work, which has been busy. The world cup is completely killing my sleeping schedule. The games are either at 1 am or 5 am, and I’ve been watching quite a few. I’ve also become rather addicted to the footy, and went to a match last weekend as well.

Finally, here’s a shot of a Humpback whale, as seen off of the North head by our house. We stopped by here on the way back from the Hunter.