Manly Pipe Band - Scottish Ball

The boys in their kilts. Gordon and Fraser both wearing their new ones. From left to right:
Sam is wearing Fraser Tartan (his Gran's family - Kiwi)
Fraser is wearing Lindsay (his surname and clan! Frase went to Watford Boys with me lives here now too)
Andrew is wearing Mclaren (a relatives family name - Andrew is a friend from work in Sydney)
Gordon is wearing MacKenzie (our family's connection to a clan).

The Manly Pipe bands annual ball was a chance to don the kilt and dust off the brogues for a bit of a dancing! Great fun and getting the ferry in Sydney in a kilt raises a few eye brows and had tourists taking pictures of Sam and I? Very Aussie for them.. not.

Live Earth - 07.07.07

Doing our bit to save the planet. Live Earth Sydney - Sneaky Sound System, Ghostwriters, Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins, John Butler Trio, Wolfmother, Jack Johnson and Crowded House. A good day out and for a good cause, the planet.

Where have you been?

Well K and I have bought a new house in Five Dock and have been busy sorting that out. It's great to have our own place again, we're loving it. I've also been neglecting the blog as my new found friend Facebook has been taking up so much of my spare PC time.... sorry blogger!

Kangaroo Valley Easter Camp

We (K, G, Andrew, Chrissy, Dan and Caroline) popped down to Kangaroo Valley for an Easter camping trip, and true to form, for NSW's Easter breaks, it pissed with rain on an off for the whole 3 days! Great fun though. Check out the video link on youtube below, funny ending made us laugh and laugh.... there's not much to do but drink on the campsite at night you know.

Link to YouTube video Kangaroo Valley Biking: Click here

Sydney Bridge 75th Birthday

Sydney Harbour Bridge was 75 years old te day after paddies day. So we braved the hangovers after a night on the 'black stuff' and headed to the bridge walk, they closed it for the day and we, along with a couple of million other yellow hat cladded people walked over from North to South. Later there was a light show... oooohhhh here is a pic one of the guys from work took.

SuperBikes '07 Phillip Island

We headed down again for the third year in a row, I've got to get a bike!

Uk Christmas Trip 2006

Pictures speak a thousand words and that.....so here's a couple of thousand!

Nearly the end of another year.... I thought it was time for the GoggyBlog to have a new look...

Don is spreading the word......Parakey

I got a message from my bro Don to check out the mowblog he'd just updated.... he'd not been updating it for a while but there has been a flurry of postings over the last few weeks... winter must have arrived finally in the UK? We'll find out in just over a week when we're back for Christmas.
Here's an interesting article I got from Don - it's a bit of reading if you click on the article but sounds cool, watch out for PARAKEY in the new year! Next he'll be setting up Oracle meetings in SecondLife?? maybe we can talk about that over Christmas....

"The guy who co-invented the Firefox web browser, Blake Ross, is about to unveil a radical new way of managing all your content, wherever it might reside. The project is called Parakey. Essentially, it will overlay your existing OS and allow you to manage your photos, files, web pages by creating a kind of local server on your machine. You can then decide whom you want to give access by allocating different keys for friends, family, public access etc. You can sign up to get information on the project at www.parakey.com and read about it in this article on IEEE Spectrum." - Mowblog8th Dec 2006

Tweed Heads / Coolangatta weekend

We popped up to the Gold Coast for a weekend to visit Ja and Cass and check out their new house in South Tweed. It's a gorgeous place they've bought with get views of the Tweed river.

Tweed Heads is right on the NSW boarder with Queensland.
They showed us around and it's a lovely area, Cheers Ja and Cass!

















Beers down at Coolangatta RSL in the evening....
This is the longest surf break in Australia.

A week in New Zealand's South Island

We travelled around the South Island for a week. The first weekend was spent in Christchurch with some friends who we met playing touch rugby in London (Rick and Sue), they showed us around and took us to a rugby game Canterbury vs. Counties in Christchurch's international stadium. Then on Monday morning (with a car lent from the Harlow family) we headed down through the middle of the south Island to Lake Tekapo (take-a-poo hehehe) for a hike up a hill with great views of the lake and mountains.

Lake Tekapo - from ground and up hill

We continued down for my birthday night in Wanaka (nice small Ski town though low season this time of year).

Queenstown lake view
Tuesday and an hour drive over the Crown ranges to Queenstown (great picturesque town on the lake!) for two nights and a bit of Jet boating, Quad biking and a few beers or 5! avoided the bungy jumps though. Next it was back up the west coast to Fox Glacier where we booked in on the afternoon Heli Hike on the glacier. This was definitely the highlight of our week very impressive and even educational, brought back geography lesson memories from Watford Boys, I’m sure I did a project on glaciers at some point!


View up Fox Glacier from the middle


View down Fox Glacier.

Finally back to Christchurch via Arthur’s pass and home to Sydney. So we did over 1300 km in 5 days, not a real relaxing trip but the countryside is spectacular and hardly any traffic. K and I think it’s a mixture between South Africa, Scotland and the French Alps that makes up the look and terrain of the South Island New Zealand. We’ll have to go back to see the rest of it and visit some of the Ski fields!

Arctic Monkey's made it to Sydney

Karen, myself, Andrew, Chrissie (Andrew's wife) and Steve, went and watched the Arctic Monkeys at the Enmore Theater in NewTown the other night. Great venue for a gig, it's kind of like Brixton Academy in feel but about 1/3 the size, so big enough to feel atmosphere but intimate enough to make it feel like they are playing just to you. Man they are good too!! one of the best concerts I've been too. Though they do look like a school band when they first come out, probably because they are only 18 eh?!

Ski Thredbo 2006

Timbo, AL, Steve, Dan and myself jumped in Tim's X5 and headed down to Thredbo for a long weekend. There wasn't much snow this year (pictures are of the top), but we had a great laugh all the same...... We are skiing in Australia, what do you expect. Karen opted to stay at home and pack up in Cronulla before our move to Paddington next week, City life here we come.

Cold Play X & Y

Cold Play concert at the Sydney Entertainment Center.
Great venue and one of the best concerts we've ever been too! Cold Play rock.
It was a big Monday: Work, Boot Camp, Cold Play the Australia vs Italy - shame they went out great day though.

A Long Weekend in Fiji

OMG...... that was one of the best long weekends ever!
K and I had a trip over to Fiji for the Queens Birthday long weekend. It was a kind of scouting mission to look at the plan of having our wedding over there next autumn (BST).
We had origionally said Oct 2007, but it seems School Holidays for NZ and Aus are in Oct/ late September, so most likely dates we are looking at is mid-Late September 2007........ we'll keep you posted..................
We caught up with Rob Jo and their boys, and even Rob's parents!, for one evening down on the Coral coast, shame they aren't planning on staying in Fiji now as we could have all dossed with them over the wedding time ;) hehehe just kidding.

Winter in ShellHarbour

This is and example of what we love about Australia...... 'Winter in Shellharbour' (where K grew up), beats winter in Aberdeen as a student hands down, I can tell you.

Just popped down for the weekend to say hi..... G watching the surfers.

Kangaroo Valley and Fitzroy Falls

Since Australia has two long weekends back to back K and I decided to use the second one (plus an extra day) to go camping in Kangaroo Valley, Southern Highlands. It's only about 1 hour from where K grew up and is beautiful.

The days were sunny and warm about 25 degrees but the nights dropped to about 2-3 degrees quite a shock for us after such a hot summer here. Luckily we were well prepared, still a scout at heart me. Dan (or Suntan as he likes to be known, one of my mates from work, a Canadian and mean Bike rider) decided to join us for our downhill mountain bike ride on the Sunday. It was a 3 hour early morning drive from Manly for the lad. We got a bus ride up to Fitzroy Falls with the guide and given our bikes and a trail to follow back down. Dan said it was "entry level, but good fun". K said "oh my god I nearly died!" she went over the handle bars twice. I said "wwwooaaahhh and aahhhhh and ffuuuucccckkk and wwwwweeeeeee" trying to keep up with Dan and his tricks!

We had a well earned beer or 2 after that 12km downhill.

On the way back we visited Mossvale - Highland Wines, Robertson's The Big Potatoe and Cheese Factory (Don's House). On Tuesday we had a good Anzac day playing 2-up with our mates in ShellHarbour (if you don't know what 2-up is for Anzac day then Google it!).