Water

Xan jumping out of the surf.
If you like we can pretend that I just captured this in real life, rather than asking him to flick out of the water half a dozen times.... that would make it a lot cooler!!!

We spent the weekend at Noosa.  Awesome beach, great family time.  Ruth got to do lots of relaxing, the boys and I got to do lots of swimming.

Down side of an older car...

So, there are all these things you take for granted when you have them....
and when you make a decision to go back to an older model, they are no longer there....

In this case, in every car I have owned for the last 2 decades I have had a little thing that tells me "distance to empty".  I no longer have that - and it turns out that I use that a lot...

My car decided to stop working on the highway on the way home.
I pulled off to the side, called Ruth, who soon arrived, (laughing the whole way) with a fuel can.

Luckily I had a camera to record the whole experience...

Issues Stymie Leaving Yesterday

Well,
Leaving China involved a domestic flight and then a boring 6 hour wait for our international flight... but we took care of that.  The domestic flight was very nearly 6 hours late, so after a couple of phone calls from inside the plane while we were sitting waiting to (eventually take off) we stayed in Beijing for an extra night...

All worked out ok.

It would have been good to have a guardian angel to look at what the flights were doing.  Just someone watching and seeing I had got in safely... I used to have one of those, but since then the flights have not been quite as trouble free.


this is the plane leaving Hong Kong the following day.

Panoramas

A bit of Great Wall...

A bit of Forbidden City....

more play with a waterproof camera!

Water was not perfect....
there have been some storms off the coast, so it was stirred up pretty badly...

But still had some fun...

and finally.... a self portrait... the idea being I would wait until a wave nearly hit me... this was one of the better attempts.

Wearing a bib....

Us westerners, when eating, sometimes need a little help to stay clean...

Silk Markets

A shot of the Silk Markets from across the street....

No prices...
very few rules (apart from a claim inside the door that people should only buy authentic merchandise)...

Lots and lots of haggling....
I was not quite in a haggling mood last night so I was not at the top of my bargaining game. I walked away quite sure I had been massively ripped off rather than just mildly pickpocketted....

Very COLD

For my birthday I got a waterproof camera.... it is going to be all sorts of fun...

but because I could not wait to go to the beach with it, I got the boys to throw buckets of water over me.

I should have thought a little harder than this about the consequences about being soaked in cold water in the Highfields wind at 5 in the evening, but I am rarely accused of over thinking things!!