Constantia for lunch and ice-cream with Jo

A delicious oven-roasted veggie salad and amazing homemade ice-cream with chucks of cherry.  This place is a winner.

Matthew in heaven

Celebrating my 44th birthday with Sue at The Oaks

It was lovely to spend time with Sue as always and getting to hear all about her recent trip to Poland, The Arctic and Iceland.  The highlight food wise was the enormous apple, raspberry and rhubarb crumble.  Almost as good as mum used to make!

Farewell dinner with Chrisèl

Chrisèl leaves on Saturday for South Africa where she'll spend the next year.  Needless to say, I'm feeling sad and will miss her enormously.  To say goodbye, we went to Radio Cairo (which appropriately is an African themed restaurant) for delicious boerewors, lamb sosaties, succulent pork ribs in an amazing sauce, Mozambican chille prawns, crème brulee, mint tea ice cream and a Mozambique tartlet.  We enjoyed every mouthful!

Sydney chocolate tour

For my birthday, Chrisèl treated me to a chocolate tour in the city. We spent a wonderful morning, walking between all the chocolate places, sampling the delicious chocolates, drinking hot chocolate, hearing fascinating facts about chocolate from the friendly tour leader and talking about chocolate with the fellow tour attendees.  The highlight chocolate was a cherry liquor one that tasted like heaven. By the end of the tour, we were both totally stuffed but on a huge sugar high.  Definitely one the best and most memorable birthday presents I've ever received.

After all the sweetness, we felt like something bitter.  So what better than a big jug of beer in Hyde Park!!

In the evening, we met up with  Spanish friend of Chrisèl (Angel) who was visiting Australia with three friends.  Chrisèl hadn't seen Angel for 11 years so there was lots to catch up on.  They were a super bunch of people and we had a great night out, that ended in this very atmospheric, lesser know pub with moose heads on the wall!

Another relaxing weekend on The Central Coast

Some highlights of the weekend included ...

• A walk past lovely jetties.
• Watching The Notebook - what a wonderful tearjerker!
• A scrumptious sea food pasta meal at a delightful local Italian restaurant.  The dessert was especially delicious. It was lovely eating and listening to the rain outside.
• Trying out yoga which I loved.
• Lovely fresh veggie juice at the local mall, followed by iced chocolate.
• The sun coming out on Sunday afternoon - motivating us to go for a walk along the beach.
• Orange and cinnamon tea - yum!  
• My first taste of Halloumi cheese.
• Listening to great music in the car - including Chrisèl's wonderful 80's CD.
• All in all, another super weekend.

Orgiastic desserts

Chrisèl loves jeeps!!

Coral, Fire and Ice at the Opera House

I went to the Opera House to see a presentation by National Geographic underwater photographer, David Doubilet.  His work was absolutely sublime.  So nice to share this with some lovely friends: Brendan, Eva and Ella, Chris, Chrisèl, Lauren and Sue.  A wonderful and inspiring afternoon...

   

... followed by a lovely and fun walk at dusk in The Botanical Gardens with Chrisèl ...

... and finished off with indescribably good Belgian Waffles and iced dark chocolate at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe.   The closest I've come to heaven in quite a while!

Hout Bay and Chapman's Peak with Russell

It's so wonderful that Russell is in Cape Town at the same time as me. Today, we were happily reunited after not seeing each other since he was in Sydney in 2010.

Russell is staying in Hout Bay with his mum.  It was lovely to see her again too, and I was amazed to find that Sally is still alive.  She is 18 I think!  She's slow and a bit hobbled but the Sally sparkle is still there.  I burst into tears when I saw her as it made me realise Mack is going to get old too one day.

Russell and I then went for ice-cream at my favourite Italian ice-cream place in Hout Bay followed by some geo-caching and leaping on the beautiful Chapman's Peak.

Sally, now 18 years old!!

My favourite ice cream place in just about the whole world.  I did my usual 4 scoops bonanza.

Views from Chapman's Peak

Russell and I doing what we do best.

Weekend at The Hunter Valley

Dani and I had a great weekend in the vineyards of Hunter Valley.  There was plenty of rain on Saturday, but that didn't stop us from visiting lots of vineyards and sampling plenty of wine.  

Some highlights of the weekend:

• Picking up Dani in Newcastle on Friday afternoon after she'd had a meeting there with other University sustainability managers.
• The amazing views from our room.
• A delicious pizza at a very nice restaurant on Friday night.
• Watching several episodes of "Breaking Bad."  What a great series, highly recommended.
• Visiting vineyards and trying lots of wine.
• Selecting delicious home made chocolates at a local chocolate shop.
• On Sunday morning, the best mocha and delicious crumble at a restaurant specialising in nothing but desserts.
• Checking out lots of great sculptures at one of the wine farms.
• Hunting down a bottle of sparkling Shiraz.
• Discovering that most of the ways out of the Hunter Valley were closed due to floods.  It took us quite a while to get back home!

Views of the vineyard from our hotel

view from hotel room

Delicious dessert for breakfast

One of the restaurants in Hunter Valley specialises entirely on desserts.  What an amazing selection of mouth-watering treasures they had.  And what difficult decisions.  I had Apple and Rasberry Crumble and Dani tucked into Lemon Merengue Pie.  The highlight, though, was the Mocha that came with a jug of rich, molten chocolate that we had to spoon in ourselves.  Best Mocha of my life and I've sampled quite a few!

Mocha doesn't come better

Dani wasn't being a glutton - half of that was mine!

Statues at a local vineyard

One of the vineyards we visited had a great art gallery and a statue garden.  Here are some of the statues that caught my eye.

When floods get in the way of home

We took an extra couple of hours to get home because it had been raining hard, and the first two routes we tried turned out to be flooded!