Bend in the Road

Friday morning, 1.55am after around 4hours of sleep, my phone started buzzing to remind me of the England game. I crawled into the front room like duvet shelled tortoise to cheer the boys on. Sadly, England did nothing for much of the game to keep me from slipping into sleep - until Crouch and Gerrard popped up in the final 10minutes to send us through to the next round.

After a Saturday morning World Cup hangover (catching up on sleep I'd been losing all week watching the games), we headed out to Glebe Market - a recommendation that decribed the place as a cool clothes and trinket market in a hip part of town. It was okay if a little small, and the vibe was indeed quite cool. I bought no clothes, but a couple of cracking cds at rock bottom prices. We continued the slow paced weekend with a trip to the cinema - which ended in a viewing of one of the worst films I've seen in a long time - Poseidon - it's almost comedy how bad it is. It really is.

Sunday I got up (to a strange argument with one of our neighbours which ended in her apologising for the noise they'd been making repairing furniture at 7am, with a bottle of Chardonnay) and collected a hire car for a little day trip we were all looking forward to going on. An hours drive North of Sydney got us to Ku Ring Gai Chase national park.

Most of the National Parks have something different to offer than the last, and this was no different. It almost has a European feel about it, lush green hills meeting a wildy crazy estuary. Our first stop saw ustaking in some lake like views as a father taught his daughter to fish. Very idillic, as the little girls reel went mental. She tried her best to pull the beastie in, but dad took over. He battled for 2 or 3 minutes and it the fish splashed around in the water in front of us, the little girl asked "What is it dad?", to which he replied as only an Aussie dad can - "It's a bloody great fish!"

Onward, we were heading around the winding hilly roads to the set of Home & Away - Palm Beach. Located on a peninsula North of Sydney, the area is obviously very wealthy and very beautiful. The temperature too was way more forgiving than the average 19degrees I'd been getting way to used to. We soon found the Surf Club, the trade mark beach walk fence and also spotted Alf Stuarts Boat House. Sadly there were no cast members (to heckle) so we stayed around for some lunch before heading back into Ku Ring Gai Chase.

A new feature to the blog this week - is a little video of yours truly filling in for the missing Alf Stewart of Summer Bay fame.


We were able to check out a great couple of view points over Lion Rock (named after the Egyptian Sphynx) and America Bay - a 1km walk through the bush eventually finding it's way to a small waterfall overlooking a surreal snorkelling bay with a couple of millionaires pleasure-mobiles anchored for show. We also got a look in on the "Basin Walk" famed locally for it's aboriginal rock engravings. I was a little sceptical after the hand prints a few weeks ago, but these were a little more interesting. Fish, Turtles, people, Roos - all right there in the rock for... I'm not too sure how long. But they were pretty cool nonetheless.

Back into the working week, the obvious highlight was the England V Sweden match. It all looked so promising until the second half. Ah well, after 2-2 and a Joe Coal wonder strike we won the group and get to play Ecquador in the next round - thankfully over the weekend at 1am!