weekend at Port Stephens

Friday night Tony, Jacky, Mike and I drove up the coast to Port Stephens, about a three hour drive. It was a dark night and we listened to soft-pop cheesy radio stations, the songs of which we all mysteriously knew the words for...

We got settled into Tony's parents' beach retreat, a pretty place with wraparound windows and balcony looking out over the water, with palm trees and a beach in front of us. The next day, Saturday, we hiked up a mountain (a small one, it took 30 minutes) and looked out over sandspits, long white beaches, the Pacific, the little islands flung along the shoreline, the colour of the water far below (an emerald green turning into royal blue as it got deeper). Then we hiked back down and went swimming in one of the 'paradise' beaches we'd seen from the summit, there were maybe 10 other people there and it was an absolutely glorious day. Tony brought out his surfboard and I strapped the tether to my ankle and then...didn't catch a wave! I played in the breakers for a bit, but the power of the water is still kind of scary. I'm getting more comfortable with it, though, and may yet be a surfing bird by the time I go.

Then we bought fish steaks and meat (for the boys) and went back to the apartment and made a fantastic dinner of blue-eyed cod, jewfish, a salad, and of course the steaks and lamb chops for the males present. Jacky had falafel, yum yum. Sunday was a pretty chilled out day, on the way home we stopped at Lemontree Passage and tried to find koalas in the wild, but I think they were too drugged up on eucalyptus and there were none to be found.

Then there was dinner at Yadira's new apartment in Petersham, complete with an impromptu four-person dance party that got the neighbours complaining, and then we went to Newtown briefly to go to Frigid, an electronica night at the Newtown RSL. I had plum wine and hobnobbed with the boys and girls, but we came home early as it was raining hard out and we were tired.

Monday begins a new week, Blackalicious is playing and I'm going to get some things sorted, yo. Where am I off to next? What interests me now? What sights are there to see? The answers to these are important but could be a lot of things, really. It's easy to stress yourself out wanting a journey to go perfectly, but what I don't think about sometimes is that a journey is really an uncontrollable thing. Each step you take into something unknown is a little more control you're giving up. That's where life happens.