Australia Part III - Day Three

O.K. so now that we were at the actual place that we were staying in Aussie, we slept in a bit and then took advantage of the tennis and pool facilities. You had to book the court in advance for a thirty minute slot, but fortunately there was only one day that we found it in high demand. Scott and I came to realize that it had been quite some time since we had actually played tennis when three of the balls we hit went outside the court and one ended up on the roof of the main building. Ooops. Andre and Martina we are not.

Our unit and rental car.

The lane between the buildings was lined with cool trees with purple flowers.

Reception and main building.

Cool Australian flower?

Picnic area with outdoor griddles.

Game area.

Scott getting ready to kick my tennis behind.

Pool and spa (i.e. hot tub sans the hot).

A little stream flowed through the main building between the pool and tennis court and the game areas.

And it had koi in it.

Adults only game room.

They were in the process of building docks into the canal.

Anyways, after we showered up, our main plan for the day was to head down to a town called Narooma about two hours south for an evening penguin boat tour. The tour consisted of a boat ride out to an island off the coast where there was a penguin sanctuary. We were quite excited and wanted to head down with plenty of time to make sure we were not late. We thought that we could spend the extra time exploring the town. We were somewhat...mistaken on all accounts.

Anyways, the trip down was uneventful...O.K. it was pretty boring, and when we got into the town, it was ghost-town like. There were several reasons for this. One, we were in the off season, two, it was Sunday, and three, the place just was not that interesting to begin with sadly. We hit the Visitor's Center to get some information on the area, and naturally it was closed, so we kinda meandered around a bit and I got a craving for ice cream. Fortunately, we did manage to find an open sweet shop that sold ice cream, procured our ice cream, and then found a nice bench with kinda a view to sit and eat. We sat around...

After a bit I asked Scott if he wanted to get a beer at the nearby pub with the "Million Dollar View". He said O.K. We had already scoped out the dock where we were to meet for the penguin tour, and we had plenty of time to kill still. So we went to the bar and Scott had a James Squire Amber Ale and I had a Tooney Old Ale (which we had seen advertised everywhere). His was better than mine (9/10), but mine was not bad (8/10). The view was pretty good, but I thought that "Million Dollar" was a bit of an overestimation. Our main entertainment as we sat was a seagull whom we named Klaxon who was defending his turf of outdoor patio tables very exuberantly, especially after we ordered food. I had a Greek salad and Scott had chips (i.e. fries). While sitting out on the patio of the bar admiring the aformentioned view, we noticed a pier that you could walk out on and decided that we needed to get up off our lazy backsides and actually DO something, so off we went to explore the pier.

Klaxon.

"Million Dollar View"

More expensive view.

The pier was pretty cool.

Neat hole in the rock.

Pier and rocky shore.

End of the pier with huge concrete caltrops.

View from end of pier.

Waves crashing on the pier.

View of outlet to the ocean.

Breakwall on the other side of the inlet.

Me on the pier.

Another view of the pier.

Pier from nearby observation deck.

Cute little lizard guy in the path. I wonder if he is poisonous. Isn't everything in Australia poisonous?

Two people about to see some penguins.

I had to climb over some rocks to get to the water and see how cold it was. Pretty cold.

Wee crabs.

We then headed back to the docks to meet for the tour and a nice lady who was fishing pointed out some dolphins heading into the cove. While I was frantically trying to photograph the dolphins, Scott was with the tour captain discovering that he had canceled the tour due to lack of people. Apparently it was only worth his time to make the trip if there were 8 people and so far there was only Scott and me. He did promise to try to drum up business and we tentatively rescheduled for later on in the week, but we were instructed to call before driving down, so I was not too optimistic. A damper was definitely put on the evening with this news, but we decided to take a walk on the other side of the cove entrance, so our visit was not a total bust.

These pictures are of dolphins, I swear.

There was a little beach for swimming here and some other cool things to see, but no penguins. :(

A cool bird I scrambled to get some pictures of only to see about a billion more during our trip.

Apparently the water is rock hard and slippery and you should beware of Cthulu.

Scott checks out the swimming area.

Between the rocks is the wide ocean.

The shore side of the beach area.


There were thousands of these little mollusk guys. Notice their trails.

Birds.

Jelly...thing...

We headed home with heavy hearts but there was a very pretty cloudy sunset over the ocean, and we did spot a beautiful secluded beach and some kangaroos, so not a total loss.

Whoops, also was a cool old Gothic church on the way back.

Those last four photos are kangaroos. Honestly! We could not get any closer because they were on private property. In fact the owners came home while we were still blocking their driveway.