Yesterday our friends Freddy and Vicky from Germany came around, and we took them up to Blue Fish Point.  If you’ve already been to visit us, you will have been up here, as it is so close to our house – about a 15 minute walk – and it is so beautiful.  The above photos is Karen and Vicky on the walk to the point, and below is Dre and Freddy standing on the point.

And this is the Echidna that ran across the path in front of us!  OK, admitedly not the best photo, but how often do you get to see an Echidna in the wild?  How cool is that.  It ran right in front of but we weren’t quick enough to take a photo until he went into the bush.

We wandered up to North Head, it is about a 20 minute walk from our house, to see the yachts.  We then realised what a big deal it is, there were thousands of people up there, with a really cool atmosphere.  There were over 10 helicopters covering the event, and it was amazing how many boats there were.

This is Nick and Amber, our mates who we originally planned to spend Christmas Day with…. by the time Christmas rolled around, we had all invited a few other Orphans, so we ended up with a gathering of 13 friends.  It was really good because it rained on Xmas eve, so it scared most Sydney people into other Xmas plans, and so the beach wasn’t that busy (even though Christmas Day turned out beautiful and sunny).  We went around to Shelley Beach and looked back at Manly Beach all day.  (Shelley Beach is about a further 5 minute walk for us, from Manly Beach).  We had a few swims throughout the day, and Secret Santa was kind to us both, Karen got wine and chocolate (yum) and Dre got a Lilo so we all floated around on the Lilo for half the day.  After we’d all had too much to drink and too much sun, we retired to Nick and Ambers rooftop to have some more drinks, and then came home for a Christmas Pizza. (?)

 

View all of Karen and Dre’s photos of Christmas Day at Shelley Beach

Merry Christmas!

We got invited over to our friends Scottie and Soph’s house for a Christmas Eve dinner, and we had a ball!  Nick cooked the famous Turducken, which is a Turkey, stuffed with a Duck, stuffed with a Chicken, stuffed with vege stuffing.  Yum yum!  It is all de-boned and made specially by the butcher so that you can just slice through it and you’re ready to go.

Here’s what it looked like:

To view all of our Christmas Eve antics (and for lots of shots of the Turducken) click the link below and then click the yellow button ‘View Slideshow’

Christmas Eve Party Photos

We even got to have gluten-free gravy, which was very cool for Karen.  An awesome time was had by all.

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See the comparison here…. the one on the left is our normal view, the one on the right is the ‘air-is-filled-with-smoke’ view.  It was so amazingly smoky, and sooooo hot, we had to shut the doors and windows as it was so hot outside.  And 10 minutes outside in the smoke was all it took for eyes to start watering – it was intense.  Luckily this only lasted for a day as at around 6pm the wind blew all the smoke away.

OK this one is totally just for the non-Aussies reading this – I’m sure if you’re an Aussie and reading this you will be laughing, but anyway.  Check this out in comparison to the size of Karen’s hand… it must be at least 5 times size of the ones you find in NZ.

This is Dre’s MOvember.  Thank god the first of December came, and he shaved it off!  He only started growing it about 2 and a half weeks into Movember, so it never got past the really really prickly stage.

We had many a bottle of sparkling wine…. then went out for dinner and had more wine.  A good day.

This little guy comes over for food occassionally, here he is eating some chicken!  We have lots of Kookaburra’s in the trees right outside our house, sometimes it’s pretty noisy, but kinda cool as well.