Jude showing off his commemorative coin in front of the Opera House

The weather has not been kind to us this week. After a glorious weekend we had five days of rain this week which meant not nearly as much beach time as we would have liked. Luckily there are many other good things to do in Sydney and some of them are indoors. We went into the city on consecutive days to see the Opera House and the Wildlife Experience (a small zoo) and there was also Manly aquarium.

Jude and Anna fighting with their “light sabers”

One of the great things about staying in Manly is that you have the beach, the harbour (with a short ferry ride to downtown Sydney) and the walk to Shelley Beach. We have done that walk many times and Marcy took the kids one day this week while I was with my dad and they had a blast. There is a also a nature reserve with a trail that leads to the Sydney Harbour National Park. On this day the kids saw an echidna in the wild and explored some caves as well. They also “fought” each other with sticks that were supposed to be light sabers after having watched a Star Wars movie the previous day.

Bareback horse riding down on the farm

This weekend we did two long trips out into the country. On Saturday we drove down to Uncle Mark and Aunt Robyn’s new farm. They have five horses and as soon as we got there Anna asked if they could go and ride the horses. One of them is a docile old thoroughbred named Cruise who the kids have actually ridden before three years ago when we were last here. This farm backs on to some pretty thick forest and when we went exploring Jude and Anna saw kangaroos in the wild for the first time.

The baby alpaca is curious about Anna

On Sunday we went to my friend Richard’s farm where he keeps about 80 alpacas. There were six baby alpacas that had all been born in the past couple of months and the kids loved seeing them. Then Jude was put to work at feeding time – he had to fill the buckets with new grass and the male alpacas were very happy to see him.

Feeding the male stud alpacas at Richard’s farm

This past week we caught the ferry back to our old Cremorne neighborhood, where we lived when we were in Sydney. Jude recognized quite a lot of things and Anna even ran up to the “super axe hacker” tree where they spent some time carving three years ago. We also went to the old field, a place where the kids spent many, many hours playing and exploring. We all felt quite nostalgic as we had such a great time when we lived here in 2012.

Recapturing an iconic photo from three years ago on the Cremorne ferry