Birthday getaway

My lovely wife planned ahead and took me away for a nice birthday weekend. She booked a bed and breakfast at a lighthouse in a little town named Southwest Rocks. It's about 2 hours north of our house, obviously on the coast.

One problem with planning way ahead is that the children's ever changing schedules can severely impact the amount of hours one spends away from the aforementioned kids...Mariah qualified for the Regional Athletics Carnival in Newcastle so we spent all of Friday down there, and Jake's soccer team won the league soccer title and got to play the champs from up north on Sunday morning. We had about 20 hours to squeeze in a little squeezing. I'd have preferred about 48!

The town was very nice, as were the beaches. The weather was not as accommodating. We did get a couple of short hikes in before the nasty stuff set in. It was kind of nice being in a lighthouse keepers house while a storm was going on outside. We almost hit a huge kangaroo as we drove back up to the lighthouse after having dinner in town. It was dark and rainy and the big bugger just bounded out in front of us. We had a fantastic breakfast the next morning before rushing back down south Jake's game.

This is one of the favorite places of many of our Old Bar friends. There are lots of camping spots with lots of trails and beaches to explore. We won't get up here again and that's a bit sad for us. It'll have to wait till our next trip down here. We look at our calendar for October and November and see that it is pretty booked. Trying to squeeze every drop out of our trip. Can you imagine Karen thinking that way? Yeah, I can too...