Part 4: Do they surf in Australia?

No snow? No problem. Into Nathan Lyon's car and off to the coast. We drove about 4.5 hours down to Nathan's house in Jan Juc, which of course everybody knows is next to Torquey, which of course everybody knows in near Geelong.

We'll be doing pronounciation tests at a later date. Trust me, you'll get them all wrong.


OK, so the picture is lousy (sue me, it was a cloudy day), but I had to put this one in just to show that these jumpy little buggers do indeed exist.

These guys were in a field not far from Nathan's Dad's (Speaky's) house.


These images were taken on Jan Juc beach. Normally Nathan assures me the place would be crawling with surfers, but apparently the waves weren't up to the discrimanting standards of the locals (it is winter after all, so the tourists who would surf 'em anyway are all on the other side of the world at the moment).

A couple of days ago I sent video mail to Katharine and Aaron (hey, I have the web cam, I've just got to play with it!). Katharine was so thrilled to get the video mail from me that she immediately sent me a reply.

Imagine my excitement as I brought up my email and saw that Katharine had replied. I put my mouse over her message and then paused, just for a moment, to savor the thrill of wondering how she would express her amazement at receiving such a special bit of computer wizardry from her absent husband.

I firmly clicked the mouse button and watched my web broswer drag the bits of her response across several thousand miles of Al Gore's internet.

Her reply, and I quote: "Get a haircut."

OK...here's the proof that I always listen to what Katharine says.


The following day I stole Nathan's car and went for a short drive down the coast, only occasionally having to remind myself that the right side is the wrong side (or something like that).

This is the Split Rock Lighthouse, just out of the town of Anglesea. It marked the far point of my drive as it was getting late and Nathan was busy cooking dinner which I wasn't about to miss!


This is the highlight of the whole trip. Yes, it's a set of three plastic drawers that I found in a shop next to Speaky's in Geelong!

This beautiful bit of petrochemical byproduct takes the total number of pieces of furniture in my room to 3: the bed, the drawers, and the box that the drawers came in which cleverly doubles as a clothes hamper!

Now you may not find this all that exciting, but up to this point I've been keeping my clothes in (sort of) folded piles on the floor since that's where gravity tended to put them. Now with my nifty new plastic boxes I have a cool place to put a few of my clothes.