Christmas Highlights

Jessie and Goofy are not the only two characters to have joined our household over the last couple of months.  A few days after we first brought Jessie home we rescued a young couple from the Wicked Witch of the West(ern Australia).  Adam and Coralee both used to work with Barnadi at the Green Park Brasserie in Bath and the have recently been travelling the globe.  Their first stop in Australia was Perth where they stayed with Coralee's Aunty and although she might describe herself as a witch, she is not really that wicked.  She believed the place where Adam had been working was haunted, so every night would have to perform an exorcism in order to purge the house of the evil spirits he inadvertently brought back with him.  The tensions eventually got too great and so they cut their time in Perth short by a couple of months and came to stay with us, just in time for Christmas.

Instead of staying at home to cook Christmas dinner Barnadi decided this year he wanted a traditional Aussie Christmas, a BBQ on the beach.  Instead of going to the overly popular and crowded beaches like St Kilda or Brighton, Barnadi had a very specific stretch of coast line in mind, the Bellarine peninsula.  The little bit of land that sticks out into Port Phillip bay just south of Geelong is a very underrated bit of coastline, with more people heading down its counterpart the Mornington.  It is quite a long drive so we had planned to leave early, but unfortunately Adam and Coralee had other ideas, they had gone out on Christmas eve and were not prepared to be seeing anything of the day until after noon. Even once they were up, the journey was pretty torturous with sudden turns bringing on waves on nausea in our hung-over back seat companions.  By the time we arrived at the Bellarine peninsula, the hangovers had lifted, but all the available BBQs were in use.  So instead we found a nice quite beach hidden behind a small cliff and went for a swim/paddle in the calm shallow waters.  Goofy was a little undecided over his first swim but he took to it like a duck to water, or in his case a dog to water.  As we came back up from our swim we saw that all the BBQs had become available and so a Christmas dinner of Sausages, steak, lamb and turkey burgers could go ahead.  With suitably full bellies my four passengers slept the whole way home.