Dan and Amy: 2009

Dufton

A small update from England, we're travelling like crazy, trying to catch up with everyone this week and next; but we managed to squeeze in a couple of days of relaxation at a lovely cottage in Dufton, Cumbria. It was beautiful, had some great pub lunches, saw some beautiful wildlife (including the rare little red squirrel above!) and we even had a dusting of snow too.

Kickboxing : Blue Singlet Level!

4 months of kickboxing at the end of last year culminated in grading night. After many scrapes and losing lots of skin off my feet it was time to get something for my efforts! Grading was 4 x 2 minute rounds sparing. The first round I was unlucky and got the one of the trainers, he didn't go easy, he made me work for that blue singlet! Fortunately the other rounds went much better.

I wore the singlet to work the next day with a pair of shorts, Scott commented "That's the most unprofessional I've ever seen you dressed Dan"!

Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to get back into it this year, but I will.

Bird i'th hand

The lorikeets have been coming for what feels like years now, we've fed them from containers before, but never from our hands. Thanks to a tipoff from Clo, we now have them eating out of our hands! (The tip was to avoid leaving the sunflower seeds, the equivalent of lorikeet crack, around and only give them from our hands!)

Sometimes their claws hurt a bit though (yes, that expression is a mix of pain and excitement, that just ended up in an open jaw!)

Last Noosa camping of the year?

As always it was fantastic, great friends, company and food!

Amy went off for a walk with the camera, the swamp behind the campsite:

She stumbled on a huge roo!

Mariana was kind enough to let me borrow her zoom lens, just long enough for me to fall in love with it! Here are some of the shots I took.

Whle Darryl and Stacey were body boarding, Rej buried the kids!

A Brahminy Kite:

And finally, this is seriously photoshoped but I still like it:

Can't wait till next time, noosa northshore has yet to disappoint. Thanks Kate and everyone :-)

Mouses House

The Mouses House is a fantastic rainforest hideaway up in Springbrook National Park, Gold Coast Hinterland. Sam and Paula recommended we visit a while back - we had to book 3 months in advance to get in at the weekend, but it was well worth the wait!

Springbrook NP is on the Plateau of the Scenic Rim - which was formed by an ancient volcano- Mt Warning is the remnant of that volcano today, as seen in these couple of pics. We climbed Mt Warning in 2005, I could not walk for days afterward (but it was a great view from the top!). Good for some exercise guys if your Byron trip comes off and you fancy a hike!

Mt Warning in the morning

Mt Warning in the dusk

The Mouse's House is set back from the main Springbrook Road on the plateau and is made up of 11 cabins in peaceful, tranquil rainforest; fabulously relaxing (especially the spa bath!)

We didn't relax all the time, there's a few great walks in the National Park and plenty of wildlife to see.

Crimson rosella at Rosella's Cafe

Rainbow Falls, not far from Canyon Lookout

Twin falls walk

Top of blackfella falls - great lunch spot

Lyrebird

Couple of waterdragons

best of all lookout

path to the best of all lookout

And of course there were the night time visitors. We got told to bring plenty of fruit and veg...turns out even that many hungry possums can't eat 5kg of carrots (Dan!).

Very cute (and loud eaters!!)

Lastly we were lucky enough to hear some green cat birds calling - very, very strange !

Sunday chillin' in Scarborough

Megan very kindly took us out for a spin in her new Mazda 3 a couple of weekends ago; when our car was still poorly in the garage!

We had a great lunch at The Boroughs in Scarborough, good food, and live music, fantastic for chilling out on a Sunday. We had a wander round the beach front, unfortunately missed the markets, but we'll gladly go back another time.....

Also thanks again to Megan for the lovely flowers you sent; here's a couple of shots of the bouquet!

Bridge to Brisbane

Up at 4.30am we'd crashed by 5.20am, literally! It was a terrible start to the day, we picked up Darryl and made our way back through the clubbing district of Brisbane. Even at 5am it was alive, the revelers were still spilling out on to the street. We turned a corner and the next thing we knew a huge Toyota Hilux turned into the drivers side door, as we continued forward it scraped down the side of the car. Its huge bull bars tore at the metal and smashed the rear passenger window. Thankfully Darryl was sitting on the other side and avoided being showered in glass!

We pulled off the road and I grabbed the details of the driver, I wont say too much as I'm not sure it's all settled yet. Although he managed to hit us and a taxi, I think he's claiming it's not his fault.

Anyway, here's the damage.

The assessment centre wouldn't let me drive the car home, they said the pillar was twisted and it wouldn't provide any protection in another accident.

Our car isn't worth much and we were hoping it would be a write off, we even spent a couple of afternoons looking for a new car. Nothing too serious, just a bit of web window shopping.

Sadly it's going to live, the garage called us, they'll have it fixed in a couple of weeks :-(

Back to the morning of the race, Amy took the car home. The drivers door wouldn't shut by itself, it was all bent out of shape. Fortunately with a little persuasion Daryl managed to shut it, spilling glass as he slammed it and attracting attention from passing drunken revelers!

Darryl and I jumped in a cab and snaked our way through the suburbs of Brisbane trying to avoid the traffic. We had a very reluctant taxi driver, every time he hit a jam he's encourage us to get out and walk to the start of the race. I'd ask him how far we were and he'd reply about 4k! We managed to persuade him to drop us a bit further and winced as he nearly had a couple of accidents himself.

Once we got to the start, we were pretty late and found ourselves starting with the walkers. Having said that we both did really well.