Weekends Away
26 May 2008
There were a few exhibitions we wanted to see in April. The first was the Australian IFBB Pro Bodybuilding show which was won by Dexter Jackson. It was interesting seeing the contestants afterwards: knowing how short many of them are and then seeing it were two different things. Maintaining the butch theme we also went to the Motor Show. It was not very different from last year and so something of a disappointment.
Over Easter we had a few days free so we decided to go to Adelaide as it was easy to book at the last minute. We stayed opposite the Parliament and took some time to look at the Arts Centre and parkland close to the hotel. It happened that the World Beach Volleyball Championships were on at Glenelg beach, so we went to that and watched for a while.
In Adelaide we also had one of the worst and one of the best dining experiences I can remember. Dinner at “Red Ochre” was touristy but the food was remarkable. It was mentioned in The New York Times of all places. Breakfast at “The Original Pancake Kitchen” was truly awful in every way: ambience, service, food and inability of the waitstaff to calculate the bill or operate the credit card machine without assistance from the diner. I should have picked up on the warning sign outside the door. You can see others suffering live on their website.
One of Jay’s Christmas gifts had been an afternoon driving a V8 racing car (like a “stock car” in the US) at Calder Park. He did this at the start of April and I went to watch. It looked like fun but the time spent driving fast was surprisingly short. Here he is in the home straight:
Jay’s other major excitement has been a new computer. He decided to get one capable of doing the same things he programs for at work, which meant a fast quad-core machine with a good graphics card. It came with Windows Vista which apparently “doesn’t suck as much as I expected”. At least its power-saving sleep mode works properly.
For the ANZAC Day weekend, our friends Julian and James had organized to rent a house at Lorne, a beach town two hours drive Southwest of Melbourne. Eight of us went. It was not exactly beach weather, but we visited Erskine Falls in the nearby national park and walked on the beach. We also got to feed a variety of cockatoos and other parrots which came to the house.
Here are Tim, James, Jay, me, Troy, Martin and Steve at Erskine Falls.
My major conference for the year was the ANZCA Annual Scientific Meeting in Sydney: a little closer to home than last year. I spent five days in Sydney and managed to have dinner with a number of friends there. The content of the conference itself was quite good; only the trip to the Taronga Zoo to see veterinary anaethesia was disappointing after the excellent one at the 2006 ASA conference.
The major dinner for the conference was held at Luna Park which was a fun venue. Many of the rides were open for the private function: the picture is from the Tumblebug. The hall used for the dinner itself was the same place we had danced at Toybox in March, which made quite a contrast.
In the coming weeks we plan to escape Winter for a few days by going to Queensland. Meanwhile we are still looking at houses and apartments, though the market has slowed a lot since the start of the year.
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Over Easter we had a few days free so we decided to go to Adelaide as it was easy to book at the last minute. We stayed opposite the Parliament and took some time to look at the Arts Centre and parkland close to the hotel. It happened that the World Beach Volleyball Championships were on at Glenelg beach, so we went to that and watched for a while.
In Adelaide we also had one of the worst and one of the best dining experiences I can remember. Dinner at “Red Ochre” was touristy but the food was remarkable. It was mentioned in The New York Times of all places. Breakfast at “The Original Pancake Kitchen” was truly awful in every way: ambience, service, food and inability of the waitstaff to calculate the bill or operate the credit card machine without assistance from the diner. I should have picked up on the warning sign outside the door. You can see others suffering live on their website.
One of Jay’s Christmas gifts had been an afternoon driving a V8 racing car (like a “stock car” in the US) at Calder Park. He did this at the start of April and I went to watch. It looked like fun but the time spent driving fast was surprisingly short. Here he is in the home straight:
Jay’s other major excitement has been a new computer. He decided to get one capable of doing the same things he programs for at work, which meant a fast quad-core machine with a good graphics card. It came with Windows Vista which apparently “doesn’t suck as much as I expected”. At least its power-saving sleep mode works properly.
For the ANZAC Day weekend, our friends Julian and James had organized to rent a house at Lorne, a beach town two hours drive Southwest of Melbourne. Eight of us went. It was not exactly beach weather, but we visited Erskine Falls in the nearby national park and walked on the beach. We also got to feed a variety of cockatoos and other parrots which came to the house.
Here are Tim, James, Jay, me, Troy, Martin and Steve at Erskine Falls.
My major conference for the year was the ANZCA Annual Scientific Meeting in Sydney: a little closer to home than last year. I spent five days in Sydney and managed to have dinner with a number of friends there. The content of the conference itself was quite good; only the trip to the Taronga Zoo to see veterinary anaethesia was disappointing after the excellent one at the 2006 ASA conference.
The major dinner for the conference was held at Luna Park which was a fun venue. Many of the rides were open for the private function: the picture is from the Tumblebug. The hall used for the dinner itself was the same place we had danced at Toybox in March, which made quite a contrast.
In the coming weeks we plan to escape Winter for a few days by going to Queensland. Meanwhile we are still looking at houses and apartments, though the market has slowed a lot since the start of the year.
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