Blackbutt

I've been pretty slack at writing the blog, which isn't entirely unusual for me. A lot has happened in the last few days and now I need to rack my brains to remember everything.

Sadly, we didn't get round to going for a walk around Lake Macquarie, owing to Holly's new footwear and my lengthy blogging. Instead we got moving after lunch and when Jill got back from her card making we headed out to Blackbutt Reserve. Our first visit was to the koala enclosure where we got to see and rub the back of a koala. Though overpriced at $4, I decided to pay for the experience, as did Jill.

We then stopped for a lunch of chicken salad rolls, while being watched over by a Kookaburra, waiting patiently for scraps.

After lunch we had a proper look around the reserve, seeing numerous Australian species including black red-tailed cockatoos, Major Mitchells, kangaroos, wallabies, king parrots, rainbow lorikeets, tawny frogmouths, emus and a lace monitor lizard. Sadly the wombat enclosure was closed, but other than that the experience was great. What was most surprising was that there seemed to be as many unusual animal species outside the cages as inside. I was also amazed by the prehistoric sounds of the emus.

As planned we then went in search of shorts and swimming gear at Westfield, Kotara. We struggled to find what we were after. From my perspective there were hundreds of board shorts, all in size 32, all without inserts and all for around $100. What I was really after were some standard swim shorts that would be acceptable to wear in a pool back in London. I did however manage to find a couple of pairs of decent shorts.

Having eventually chosen to call it a day we eventually headed back to the house, where I got to watch a bit of the Eng vs India cricket test before settling down outside to watch night time draw in. Garry cooked some lovely pizzas on the BBQ. Another lovely evening, complete with great company, bird noises and the most incredible frog noises was more than topped off by an incredible meteor shower (shooting stars every 2-3 minutes at times).

The plan for the following day was to meet up with Jordan and Goldbergs in Newcastle and to go shopping again in Charlestown.