Merry Christmas!

Deb and I are away again, this time not for work,  but to spend Chrissie with our girls down on the coast at Yamba.

So tonight I will just post a quick piccie of the dawn of this Christmas Eve and wish you all a Merry Christmas!

Away again, but a quick WIIW anyway.

I am away in New England at the moment (the Australian New England, not the American region) so I will keep this quick.

A couple of weeks ago I posted this WIIW.

For those of you who said "feet" - well you were half right.

The feet are Lu's (my youngest)
As to what she was standing on - it is a tree root.
The tree is a lovely old (maybe 300 years) Blackbutt (Eucalyptus pilularis)  that leans out over Coffs Harbour Creek. Lu kindly agreed to be a scale.


Which leads to this week's WIIW.
What on Earth do you think this might be?

Not Dead - Just Away

My blog has been rather quiet for the last week or so.

The reason is just under a week ago I was up well before dawn to head down to the regional airport at Coffs Harbour.

I snapped this with my phone before I boarded, yes that is the sun coming up behind the De Haviland Dash-8 I flew to Sydney for a conference.

A Dash-8  is about the smallest plane I ever want to fly in. The smaller they are the bumpier planes seem to be.

So I was in Sydney for a few days before heading home on Friday. My conference ended a couple of hours before my home-bound flight.

Things got a bit stressful for a while as I tried calling a taxi. A rainy Friday afternoon and after 30 minutes I was still on the phone queue.

A quick change of plan, I jumped on an express bus which went into the CBD across the Coat-hanger (Sydney-sider slang for the HarbourBridge)

From Wynyard station in the city centre the airport is a convenient train ride.
A bad piccie I know, but it does show that Sydney suburban trains are double deckers.

The flight back to Coffs was in another Dash-8, an even smaller one! Just a thirty seater
It was a miserable flight; turbulence most of the way with ice forming on the propellers which flew off and banged on the fuselage with a real racket.

Then to add to the joy it was pouring at Coffs  and you have to walk across the apron to get into the terminal.

Thank goodness we had a relaxing weekend with our girls at Yamba to celebrate our Lu's 20th birthday. It is hard to believe our baby is 20!
 Lu our baby, when she was still a baby (more or less)