Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Sydney roadtrip, part 2 - Leichardt to Melbourne
1-3 November, 2009

David and Catherine live in Leichardt, near the University of Sydney. They weren't quite ready for us to arrive, so we stopped in a park around the corner. A nice park, but suddenly an icy cold wind came up on what had been such a warm day that I'd left all her jumpers in the car. So here she is covered in all the stray bits of things we had to hand, including Daddy's beanie - which she was determined to keep pulling over her face no matter how many times we raised it up again.

David giving us the tour of the house and back garden. It's newly painted (the house, not the garden!) and all in a lovely set of blues. The fence is a lovely bright sunset lilac-ish blue. They have some lovely trees, too, and a surprising amount of space for what looks like such a tiny house from the front.

Sitting in their garden, by the lotus and surviving koi. We didn't see the koi mostly, they were very good at hiding, which is apparently why they're still alive and not catsnack.

Catherine and Sparrow. Catherine works as a conservator at the Museum, so they had a lot of interesting artwork very carefully NOT hung on the picture rails. The picture rails were all put on the north wall of the house, and the wall gets very hot. So the things they have hanging there are like the mosaic you see behind her - beautiful, and heat-resistant. They have a lot of other beautiful and interesting artworks too, but all on other walls.

David is very funny. So is his finger. Sparrow laughed a lot. She was tired and should really have been sleeping, but she didn't care. It was all too funny to go to sleep. Catherine cooked us a gorgeous dinner - she is an excellent cook - and Sparrow spent it in the carrier while I and James walked her around. -smile- She was getting a bit wound up, hadn't been able to have her afternoon nap, and by the time of evening you see here was starting to get quite vocal. She did eventually go to sleep though, long enough for us adults to play a game of Carcassonne. She was restless the whole night, I think from a combination of having sleeps at odd times and being in a strange bed between her parents, and woke up crying a few times.

Monday morning, and I said to David "She was restless last night - I hope she didn't wake you." Dave said "Nope! I slept like a baby", and James just looked at him and said "Dave, babies don't sleep like that". But they both seemed rested and cheerful enough, and so was Sparrow. Once again I persuaded our hosts to have a group photo just before we left. Catherine and David were heading off to work seeing as NSW doesn't have a Melbourne Cup public holiday (surprise surprise!), and we were driving out. It took us around two hours to get out of Sydney, with only one spot of confusion on the way. Some beautiful views though, and I didn't realise that Royal National Park covered so much area so close to Sydney. We were driving into what's called the Illawarra, an area I've not visited before.

Just before Wollongong we saw an information centre and decided to stop. We'd been driving through hills and forest and mountain for some time, and then there was this. That's James walking out onto the balcony, carrying Sparrow. What are they looking at?

This. That's several towns including Wollongong, and they're really quite close. Just... right... there. Straight down. And the ocean too. It wasn't a brilliant view that day as it was quite misty and grey - we'd expected hot weather again and it was really quite cool.

It was a good point for a break, a driver change, and a drink at the appropriately named cafe. I have to assume that that altitude is in feet and not metres though. And then we drove down, and down, and down, through very lush forest with streamers of creeper hanging ten metres down from branches, and lots of flame trees everywhere. Funnily enough, they were Coral Flame trees which are from South America. I was expecting to see Illawarra Flame trees which are a local native to the area. I did eventually see one, but it took a while. I was enjoying driving with my new glasses - they are good for freeway driving, and meant I could glance around at the scenery and study the trees while I drove.

Our next stop was in Milton. We'd got more into farm country by that stage. I stopped at a park with a toilet sign, and found two horses leaning over the fence to say hello. By the time I'd run back to the car, got Sparrow and come back they'd given up and wandered off though.

So instead of a photo with horses, I had to take a photo of this really amazing Moreton Bay Fig. Sparrow seemed a bit startled at the size of the tree. Can't blame her really.

When we'd driven from Alex and Kylie's to David and Catherine's, the car capsule had got quite hot so I'd cooled it a little with a bottle of ice water, and given Sparrow the bottle to play with afterwards. She thought it was a great toy on a hot day. So then today she was sitting on James' lap while he ate lunch and took advantage of his distraction to wiggle herself forward to get his drink bottle, because she knew what you do with them now. That's right, you lick them. All over, on the outside.

Cobargo. Both mother and daughter needed a good wiggle, so let's all Assume The Position. We had a good break here, timed carefully to avoid some pretty impressive rain downpours.

We made it to Eden right on six o'clock, as predicted. We might have been fortyfive minutes early, but ten minutes out from the town Sparrow threw a wobbly and needed food and Out Of The Capsule Right Now. So we took a break, and then she was quite happy to keep going. It worked well, as we hadn't needed to be in Eden any earlier and we didn't know where the motel was so there was a bit of faffing around to find it. We were both glad we hadn't been having to try and keep her from grizzling too much while we drove around looking for it. Eden is full of beautiful views, being on TwoFold Bay, and this is our motel. We're right at the centre of town, at the top of the hill on the point that breaks TwoFold Bay in, well, two.

We went for an evening walk on our way to get pizza for dinner. This is the Killer Whale Museum, looking out on one half of TwoFold Bay.

This is looking down into the other half of TwoFold Bay. The sunset colours were pretty, and my mobile phone camera really couldn't capture the view (it's such a one-purpose lens). I wanted to come back and get dawn light photos with my real camera, but we didn't get out of bed in time. Eden is just a little further east than Melbourne :-)

Instead she and I had our usual get-up-and-play hour, where I attempt to fill her with cuddles and wear her out with difficult toys and give her lots of thrash time and get as much pooping done as possible before we continue on with the rest of the day. Assume The Position! (we have so many photos of her in this pose from this trip...)

We started out from Eden in good time, but just across the Victorian/NSW border we spent half an hour waiting for a major accident to clear (a semi full of woodchips colliding with a semi carrying a loader). Then we tried to stop at one of the rainforest walks on the way, seeing as that part of the state (all the stretch between Eden and Orbost, really) is warm temperate rainforest and very unusual, but it was also full of mosquitoes and we had no idea how we were going to keep them off our tender and succulent chubby baby. So we drove on to Orbost and were very ready for lunch by the time we got there. Though not much was open, seeing as it was a public holiday. Lots of people of all ages and sorts heading to the newsagency to place their bets for the big race though.

Lakes Entrance, and time for Sparrow's second lunch. It was warm in the car, but started to cool again after we left Orbost - that seems to be the rough boundary between the cool temperate coastal farmland and the warm temperate coastal rainforest. I think it's an ocean current thing. It was certainly a cold wind as she and I sat here watching the boats and the swans.

We decided to fortify ourselves with dinner before attempting to cross Melbourne east to west (the long way). So Narre Warren and the Pancake Parlour it was. Sparrow and Daddy are bopping to the music while we pick our choices from the menu. Sparrow liked the big menus, thought they were very tasty. We ended up getting home at about seven o'clock, much as we expected. We generally took around the time we expected each day. And it was fairly stress-free - she took to sleeping in the car between stops quite well, and we just made sure there were enough stops at the right time. This was definitely one of them - it can take a long time to get across Melbourne from far east to outer west, and there was no point trying to do it on low blood sugar. So once we got home we had nothing to do except settle in home, play with a toy or two, pile up the suitcases and go to sleep. It was a good trip.