First Week in Australia

A beautiful day to spend indoors. We showed up pretty early to turn all the machinery on, and then left it to warm up.

Meanwhile, we drove over the river to Nowra to get some breakfast.

Fun local ads in a window.

The leftovers from some happy times some guests had the night before.

Happily, I woke up early enough to take a short stroll on the beach. This was pretty much the last chance because we were about to check out.

Nice sand!

Nice sea!

Look at all the people there so early in the morning!

Goodbye lovely beach! Shower and packing time for me!

Later that day we checked into the Parkhaven Motor Lodge. We had the three upper rooms pictured.

A very standard issue motel room.

There was a small balcony out there.

The bathroom was fine, except for the shower head which sprayed water all over the place.

View from balcony over the parking lot.

The view to the right. Those trees housed a gazillion birds, who all woke up before seven.  Loudly.  The dinner that night was fish and chips!

On Monday, we were joined by a couple of local (Sydney) Marel people, a sales-guy and a technician. We ended up getting dinner together at the Nowra Steakhouse, which had fine steaks, but somewhat dodgy decor.

A dessert! Yay!

Behind our hotel was this nice park, which explained all the birds.  We walked past it on the way to the mall after work.

There was a huge number of these white birds there (cockatoos?), and one morning we were driving by, they filled almost all the power-lines along the street.

As we were getting some take-away hamburgers for dinner, one of the servers told us of this place where kangaroos like to hang out. So we drove there! And found kangaroos!

Sadly, it was near dusk, so there was almost no light.

Gulli valiantly attempting to take photos with is phone.

There were a lot of eucalyptus trees where we were, just like in California.

None of the houses there were really fenced in, so the kangaroos just seemed to be allowed to roam about.

The optimized breakfast: Bacon, scrambled eggs, banana bread, and avocado on the side. Sparkling water with, and mocha afterwards. This was proven to last well into the day.

Random photos on a wall.

After work, we visited a local ‘whole foods-y’ store.

Boxes of stuff!

Tempting!

Very, very tempting!

We moved on over to the mall proper, bought more groceries, and rewarded ourselves with some serve-yourself ice cream.

Buying ice cream and topping by weight makes so much sense!

That evening we went to a Thai place for dinner, and as we were eating, we remembered there was supposed to be a partial solar eclipse in Iceland. So we went online, and found the live broadcast, which…

… died spectacularly as the eclipse reached its maximum. Fail!

This is how every day started, with my laptop as the big charging hub for everything else. That white thing was the mobile WiFi, aka our sanity-saver!  We allowed ourselves an extra hour to sleep in that day before heading to the factory, yet again.

Yet another pretty day, although to be fair, we had some rainy days too.