The weather once we got back was amazing and we settled in for a long, long summer, had a couple of weekends on the beach, played plenty of golf and restarted midweek supper club! There are a serious number of restaurants just around our suburb so we have taken to task at getting around them and true to form we are progressing nicely!

Couple of weeks ago we headed to Melbourne for a long weekend. We left Sydney in beautiful 30 degree sunshine and turned up to a brisk 11 degrees Melbourne! The weekend was awesome, as usual plenty of top quality food, flowing wine and great times! It was AFL Grand Final weekend in Melbourne, given tickets were selling in excess of $1000 each we opted for a bar in St Kilda, the home suburb of one of the finalists! Unfortunately St Kilda didn’t win, but the atmosphere and fun were top notch!

Back to Sydney we have had a few weeks of rain which, given the recent dust storm, have been welcome by most so Karen will have to wait a couple of weeks for a return to the beach!  My birthday fell midweek so we opted for supper club on my actual birthday (probably one of the top three restaurant experiences to-date in Oz) and celebrations with all on the Sunday of a long weekend. The Sunday was then the turn of the rugby league grand final which resulted in a day long drinking accumulating in everyone back to ours! I don’t think the neighbours were too impressed given we were complaining the music wasn’t loud enough at 2am!!!

Anyway, wedding plans are coming along nicely – stag & hen plans are in the air and the finer detail for the wedding being discussed.

We had a weekend in Melbourne with Bear & Emily which was awesome. Eat lots of rich food, drank lots of cocktails and good wine with great company – so all in all, fab weekend! We even went to the MCG to catch a AFL game and really enjoyed the game too!

Last week we eventually got ourselves to Watsons Bay for fish & chips! Oh, and the weather that day was awesome! Middle of winter and low 20′s! Some people were on the beach in swimmers and applying sun cream, others where in hats and scarf’s! The fish and chips were simply beautiful too!

Check out the pics (especially the one of Mr Benbow + 20 years!), catch those in the UK next month for a mad week of catch up!!

We decided to have a return trip to the Hunter Valley with Dave & Sian. We also decided to get back to a roots a little and booked to stay on the caravan park which was great – an awesome setting to win by A$40m at Electronic Australian Monopoly! After having a rather large night on the sauce getting to the Hunter and then playing Monopoly we were all rather hung over the Saturday morning, some more than others, but by noon we were at the first cellar door and into the wine! By the third cellar door I had bought a case of wine and signed up for a wine membership – it would be a long & expensive weekend!

The wine was great, so much we brought back three dozen bottles! We visited some old favourites: Audrey, Pepper Tree, Tinklers and found some new gems: Tower, Piggs Peake to name a couple.

Fo the Monday we headed north again and went fishing in a tinny. Although my venture with the rod was fruitless (again!) Davey boy did catch a couple and almost promptly stepped out of the tinney to avoid the fish on the end of HIS rod! Needless to say, I had to un-hook his prizes and release back to the wild!

A top, top weekend! And we have something (for a while) to remember it by…

The festival was a great chance to try lots of new stuff, I even tried Tuna and Red Snapper – the Red Snapper was amazing and I would most definitely go to the Flying Fish, the restaurant where the dish came from!  We also sampled lots of wine from local and inter-state wineries, as usual we ended up drinking way more wine than eating any food, needless to say I was a wee bit tipsy by the end of the night (no change there then!) and very wet from the torrential rain that caused the festival to be flooded and come to an abrupt end!

We eventually got to the north shore and visited the north shore Olympic Swimming pool, which crazily is still the pool that holds many (86 at its height) of the world/Olympic records set back in 50/60’s! From here we went to Dave & Sian’s place and had a BBQ with the most amazing views over the harbour – thank god fat man has left!

We visited the Sydney aquarium which has a massive shark pool with underwater tunnels and another pool with two huge dugongs – they are amazing!!! The teeth on the sharks were particularly scary and give a very good reason not to go swimming in the surf (that and the two recent attacks in two days – a navy diver in the harbour and a surfer on bondi)! Though I think the best part of the aquarium has to be the last tank – a massive glass wall (must have been 20 foot square) – which had the most amazing mix of fish and Nemo!

We then had a visit from Mr & Mrs Watson who were on part two of their honeymoon! We had dinner a couple of nights, far too much to drink and Hurricane Ribs! Yum yum! Mark had the 1kg steak – the only other person in the world that is meant for is Ray!

For those not in the know, the weather has been quite wet for a while. But that did not put us off going to Good Vibrations for Valentines (similar to our Glastonbury) to see headlining FAT BOY SLIM!!! The day was a great laugh, Karen looked the part in her Ugg boots & rain jacket, me in just a t-shirt & shorts and I got soaked to the bone! We were all set to rock the last hour to Fat boy, but there were technical issues and every time he tried to mix a track the music went off! So did the crowd!  But he managed to play his main tunes so we got to shake our arses and giggle along – Nick & KT were very much missed at this point. So much so, we called them!!!!!!!!!!!

So this weekend we are off with the Eski again. Tonight we have a free event of Latin music and tomorrow is the Australian Short Film Festival – goon time!!!!