Brand New (Sunny!) Day

Wednesday, February 6....

So the rain stopped long enough last night (Tuesday) so that Derek could take me for a scenic drive down to the ocean & popular beach area near where his old house was. Despite the fact that it was still looking pretty stormy & the sky was still threatening burst open again, we were able to park & walk down the path & over to where the restaurant, Eats on the Beach was, where we ate dinner outside. The views are spectacular, I'll have to see what I can do about trying to post some pictures, but I may have to wait until after I come home to do that. Anyway, after dinner we drove a bit more & went to his friend Jeff's house & had a visit. His house was gorgeous & far more what I'd be used to than Derek's abode, it works for him though & that's okay, I certainly can't complain too much, he's been a great host so far!

This morning was great because for at least the better part of the day, it was sunny today! Derek went off to work for a few hours to do stuff, leaving me to once again putz around trying to find out the whereabouts of my missing suitcase.....Apparently, I was too dopey to notice that it had actually arrived last night after we'd gone out for dinner! Honestly, it was parked right outside my room where I am sleeping & this morning, I walked right past it without even noticing, so needless to say when I finally discovered it, I was doing a happy dance knowing I'd have more clean undies!

When Derek arrived home around noon, the plan was that we were going to drive out to the BlackButt Reserve to see some koalas & other cool & interesting creatures. I wasn't disappointed, we saw many beautifully coloured birds, some big some small, & almost all of them very vividly coloured. The day was sunny, with some clouds & hot, so it was a great day to do this. Once we'd gone through all of the exhibits, we went for a walk on the trail that's there, it was great until it started going up & down a lot, it wasn't long before I was huffing & puffing & hot & sweaty, for a minute there I thought Derek was secretly torturing me, but in all it was a good long walk.

Once we finished with our walk, there was a small koala presentation, one of the men working there had a female koala named Susie . He spoke about the species, & the few of us who were there got to come up closer to her & give her a scratch behind the ears & feed her a bit of her bottle. I have to say that while I didn't get to actually hold her, seeing them up close was really cool, they really are the cutest things to see, & she was very gentle & passive, & seemed perfectly at home having so much attention lavished on her.

Once we were done with Blackbutt, off we were again, we stopped by a small bakery to pick up a desert for our dinner at Louises' house. I picked out an apple cake with that really great confectioners icing on it & apple pieces in the middle, it would later turn out to be a good pick, eaten up by everyone. When we went back to the house, I decided I needed to pick up a few things so Derek drew out a map of how to walk over to the mall that was about a 10-15 minute walk away. While I was gone, he was going to mow his very tall grass in the backyard. Not that he found anything wrong with the length of his grass in his estimation, but he took enough ribbing about it to finally decide it needed a trim!

So off I went & made it there in good time, I went into the "Big W" store, which I'm told is the Australian Walmart. I picked out the few things I needed & I even ended up buying a really nice pair of fancy looking strappy (not too high) heels - Mom, I think you'll approve when you see them - at their Payless shoe store. With that, I decided to get out of there before I did some real damage. By the time I'd made it back to the house before the sky opened up & poured again, I could hear the rumbling in the sky as I walked back, so I went as fast as I could despite having gotten a small blister on the bottom of my foot from my "hike" earlier in the day.

After I'd changed clothes & Derek cleaned up a bit, we went off to Louises' house for dinner & for me to meet her girls, Ester, Acacia, & Mariah. They're all very cute, & very talented in arts & crafts, like their mom, they're into doing ceramics, Acacia set out to show us all of their creations which were really excellent. And they showed off their menagerie three cats, a dog, a very friendly & affectionate python (!!), & a fish tank of fish. Then we ended the night playing games on their X box which was a lot of fun.

So that's today in a nutshell, not sure what I'm doing tomorrow but I'm sure it'll be just as fun as today was, although it's supposed to rain again tomorrow.