Rain, rain go away!

Apparently there is a 10 year drought here, so we should be very grateful for all the rain, but frankly......I didn't cross the world to sit and look at the rain coming down in rods!! Oh well - it's not exactly cold and we have seen some beautiful rainbows, which I suppose must be quite common here given the weird mix of sunshine and rain.

As we are English, we didn't let the rain yesterday stop play - as I told one of our neighbours, if we let rain prevent us from going out in England, we would never go anywhere! He said that Australians think they will die if they get wet. In the morning we went off to the wharf in the rain to take part in the community Easter Egg Hunt - which turned out to be taking place on Sunday...it was nice though to be out for a walk nice and early (especially given that I had been awake on and off since 3am). When we got back the children were miserable about the weather, and also because on our first day here we bought the Play Station 3 we had promised them and so far we have not been able to get it to work. You can imagine how disappointing this has been for them, and there have been some tears, but they are being very brave! We are hoping that we will get it started today (and if we don't I think Andrew may have steam coming out his ears and the children may need sedating).

A bit of research told us that Meet the Robinsons was on at the local cinema, so we went off there. They have a crafty way of getting you to buy the exhorbitantly priced snacks and stuff here - you buy them at the same time as the tickets! One queue and one huge bill. Miraculously I managed to stay awake throughout the film, and afterwards the weather was improved so we went off to explore.

First stop was the beach at Balmoral, where we strolled along the beachfront and then went into a cafe for a coffee. Something that really stands out here is the quality of the catering everywhere - even your basic cafe on the beach sells every type of coffee you could imagine, lovely cakes and snacks and has really good service. And it doesn't cost a fortune. I hadn't taken the camera which was annoying, but I've find some photos on the net which I've added here. We were interested by the areas of the beach that were netted to protect from sharks. Apparently on the harbour beaches (as this is) the sharks are far more likely to come in, but I don't know how often there is a problem. However, I would certainly be inclined to swim in the netted areas! Harbour beaches have no waves and are very safe from a swimming point of view - the big waves are on the ocean beaches, which are in the area we are planning to live.

Next we went off to one of the National Park areas to look at Bradleys Point. It was really fabulously beautiful there, and the views across the Harbour to the Opera House and the Bridge were spectacular. There is a sort of amphitheatre there, and apparently it is a very popular place to watch the New Years Eve harbour fireworks from -certainly the view would be marvellous. I wondered if they ever have concerts there, as the backdrop is great. The sun was warm and I felt I could have stayed there forever - definitely a place to return to with a picnic I reckon. Andrew and I are learning to give trees a wide berth - they often seem to have big spiders webs in them with HUGE spiders in them. We don't know what the spiders are, but yesterday Andrew walked into one, and gave a display of frankly not very macho behaviour! A lesson learnt!

George was thrilled when we got back to be able to talk to his best friend Oliver on msn, and to find that he had a few emails from his mates. It really is amazing how easy it is to keep up with everyone at home, so keep the emails coming, sign up to Skype etc...it's only 9 hours difference at this time of year, so plenty of opportunities to chat...