Ok, I'm back proper this time.
The last of our house guests left yesterday, Maureen from Belfast via London an old teaching buddy of Deb's, she's no spring chicken but boy she can party with the best of them....Yes, we were at the Phillip Island Penguin Parade...we were offered a few days at my cousins beach house and decided that would be the perfect way to show Maureen some of the local wildlife....
There are 32,000 of them at the Phillip Island colony..everyone rushes in and fights over seats next to the beach to watch some sneak across the sand...then on the walk back across the dune walkway you realise they are practically falling out of the trees bleating and flapping their little flippers so much that even the Japanese girls get bored with the cuteness of it all.........Maureen was watching three of 'em stagger up a grassy path like drunks at closing time with bellies full of fish when a wallaby broke cover and nearly jumped right on top of one......
We saw koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, fruit bats, even old bats in fact if it slithered swam, flew or hopped we saw it do it's thing. And, for the locals we even saw a magpie catch a mouse( and no, not in a fauna park), that was something to see.... One part of the Phillip Island fauna community that is doing particularly well are the rabbits, we ran one over the first night we were there.......
We left the island at a more opportune time than the Colonel and Corrinne, we circled Westernport bay and then caught the ferry across Port Phillip and drove along the Great Ocean Road (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ocean_Roadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ocean_Road) to Apollo Bay. The next day we took our Irish friend to the Old Melbourne Gaol where Ned Kelly (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Kelly) was hung, the Irish have a special thing for our Ned.
Yes ,the wedding was a wild time, the bride , through no fault of her own she stressed to me , was an hour late.The weather was perfect, the bride sang Bob Dylan's "The Wedding Song" , the groom sang Barry Manilow's "I Can't Smile Without You"....... The reception was a blur. We had a song-list of 20 songs to be played by a moving feast of guests in various combinations, a logistical nightmare on a good day.....but we didn't think it fair to hire a band to play in front of our friends who'd be bored, put out they didn't get the gig or un-necessarily harsh critics so we made them sing for their supper... amongst others the bride sang Nutbush City Limits and Teardrops by the Womacks....
The best man as I said earlier headed north two days later to stay with family before heading back to Galway Ireland, he fooled us all with his fevered preparations for his speech, throwing it away at the last minute and telling of the happy couple's visit to his place in Ireland '08, an event that involved traditional Irish hospitality applied with abandon.
Ok, I'm going out to the shed , first things first, I'm going to tidy up.
