G’Day Mates!

Hello from beautiful Sydney Australia!  We have embarked on another family adventure and moved to Australia for a “Semester Abroad*”

Made it to the Boxing Day Sydney to Hobart sailing race start… but couldn’t get a non silly picture out of this crew after a massive bike ride to the north head in 85 F sunny weather!

Long story short – we moved to Sydney (Manly…well Queenscliff, steps from Freshwater beach to be specific) for the next 7 months.  We are planning to return to the US before school starts back in the US for our kids next fall. A few weeks into our time in Sydney we are LOVING all that comes with an adventure that involves moving to a new country.

We are super excited to dive into local life here, while exploring Sydney and Australia over the coming months.  We got a killer spot on the beach, have been spending a ton of days with some of our best friends from our time in London (Philippe and Linda) and have been pretty successful at aggressively avoiding sunburns.

Surfs up Dudette’s

A few frequently asked questions we got as we were planning the move:

Why Sydney? We have been planning to move to a new country with our kids for the past five plus years, specifically before the oldest gets to middle school age. We were working on Amsterdam, Lyon or Munich then caught up with our Sydney based friends last January. They “showed” us around their new house, the harbor and their sunset views. On our way to dinner that night we turned to each other at the same time and said “lets do Sydney”.  We have been here a few times (including with kids) and once we looked into the move, the big items (school, housing, visa) were not that complicated and while we don’t have a language adventure, we are traveling to places that are new for our family (been to Tasmania anyone??)

What are the kids doing? They start school in Manly at the end of January.  Until then it is a lot of beach time with a few camps (sailing, climbing, Taronga Zoo…) thrown in during their second summer holiday in the last 6 months.

Are you really coming back to California? Yes, we are. I promise!

How did you find your house? Loooots of online searching, emailing rental agents and a “facetime” tour of our spot from Philippe.

Whats the best part? The beach. The beach is the best part.

Do you surf? Well we are learning… more on this later.

Can we really come and stay? There is room at this inn! DM us for more details and dates as they are filling up fast

How is the ice cream? Its amazing. Especially Messina

Do you call a popsicle a popsicle? Nope, they are called Ice Blocks

Will you and the girls come back with Australian Accents?  Dont you hope so?!!

More posts to come soon including: the intricacies of moving to a new country with 3 kids, a quick trip to Adelaide and the Barossa wine region, Beach Life, New Years and the Holidays in Sydney and our upcoming trip to Melbourne to visit more awesome London friends and check out the Australian Open.

But for now we will leave you with the view from our front porch…

*oh you saw the asterisk? Wondering what it could possibly be alluding to? Is it that our time is technically more then “a semester”? Is it that we may stay longer? hmmm well guess you need to follow the blog to sort it out! 

Sydney Wedding Weekend

We are back in Sydney for the weekend to celebrate our friends, Philippe and Linda’s wedding.  (Yes, if your counting, this is our third stop in Sydney on this trip.)  We are also excited because our Melbourne based friends, Nathan and Libby, are flying in for the weekend too and we haven’t seen them since last fall in London.

We started the weekend off with a trip to Fort Denison for lunch.  My colleagues back in London were kind enough to give me a gift certificate to the restaurant as a parting gift, and we were definitely looking forward to this meal!

Fort Denison was once part of the Sydney Harbor fortification and is located on an island in the middle of the harbor, only accessible by ferry.  Luckily it was a beautiful day so the harbor views both on the ferry and on the fort did not disappoint!

Fire the cannons!

Then we finished up the afternoon at the Opera Bar outside the famous Sydney Opera House

And then we walked through the botanical gardens back towards our hotel, with a quick stop at the fattest tree we have ever seen (first visited here.)

The next day, the main event was Philippe and Linda’s wedding, however, this didn’t stop us from having a hearty lunch of famous tiger pies at Harry’s Cafe de Wheels.  Tiger pies are meat pies covered with mashed potatoes, mushy peas, and gravy.  While I can’t say these are what I was craving on a hot summer day…I will admit they were tasty.


Tigerrrrific!

At last it was time for Philippe and Linda’s beautiful wedding.  Check out the view and charm at their reception venue located on Sydney Harbor.

Check out that view! Can you spot the Opera House??

Rustic charm

And we loved the personal touches at the wedding too.

Philippe and Linda wrote personal notes to every guest

Lots of traveling the past few years we had missed out on a number of weddings back in the US.  But this only meant that our dance moves had been all saved up and we’re ready to go!  Unlucky for you (or lucky…) there are no pictures of our dancing, so you will just have to trust us that we were the best dancers out there (well after the bride and groom of course!)

And the evening ended with a grand sendoff for the happy couple.


No my head did not explode! Its just a sparkler silly!

Even the Kookaburra came to say hi!

KOOO KOOO KOOO KAAHH KAAAHH KAAHHH

But for Nathan, Libby, Dennis and I the weekend was not over yet. On Sunday we headed out to Bondi Beach. Turns out the rest of Sydney had the same idea as us. Check out these crowds!


Even the water was crowded!  Surfs up… more like crowds up!

We decided to walk along the beach out to the cliffs at the end of the beach.


And here is a shot from the end of the cliff point, you can almost forget about the crowds from here…

Bondi also had this cool beach side pool. This is actually a feature pretty common at Sydney Beaches, pretty cool. I have never seen anything like this in the US. Does anyone else know of one?  Maybe somewhere in Southern California?

Our verdict on the famous Sydney beaches…. Well we didn’t make it to Coogee which we hear great things about, but Manly definitely beats out Bondi any day.  Great restaurants (Bondi was pretty much all chain restaurants), much cooler transport to get there (ferry on the harbor vs. confusing and gross old train and bus combo), better surf waves and smaller crowds!

After our third visit to Sydney we felt like we had seen it all and we were ready to say goodbye. Melbourne here we come!

Beaches, Waves and Friends

Back to Sydney!

We stopped off in Sydney for a few days before heading down south to explore even more beaches.  Summertime is the best time to enjoy two of the things Sydney is famous for: beaches and waves.  We also got to catch up with some friends (from both Sydney and California) while we were here which we had definitely been looking forward to!

We stayed with our Friends Linda and Philippe in Manly again which gave us plenty of opportunities to check out the Manly beach scene. Good timing on our part: this summer Manly was home to the 2012 Australian Surf Open which overlapped with our visit.

These are the stands they erected for the contest, the contest is just in the early stages here which explains the lack of fans in the bleachers…

Here is a look at what is going on in the surf…

Speaking of surfing, Dennis also took this opportunity to practice the new skills picked up in our surf lesson the week before.  I kindly stayed on the beach this time to snap some picks… or maybe I just didn’t feel like getting all sandy…



He looks like a native

We also took at short hop up the coast from Manly to Palm Beach via the area known as the “Northern Beaches.”  Not to be confused with the Palm Beach located in Florida… Palm Beach is pretty cool, its located at the top of a peninsula so there are beaches on two sides, one an ocean beach and one a harbor beach (and the peninsula is only 300 or so meters wide), both are popular but very different as you can see in the two pictures here.

Ocean side

Harbor side

Another highlight of this stop in Manly was that we got to catch up with our friends Johnny and Anna who have been traveling the world since last spring.  The stars aligned and our itineraries overlapped again while we were both in Sydney (the first time was while we were on a weekend getaway to Lake Como from London last fall, Johnny and Anna talk about that here in their blog – scroll to the end for the part about bumping into us, its a very small world indeed!)

We all met up at a cool brewery/pub/restaurant (we are so predictable) and then headed for dinner at a popular Manly pizza spot called Beaches.  The thin crust pizzas were amazing…my mouth is watering just thinking about it again.

Nice work Dennis…sneaking the last of the wine while the rest of us smile for a picture!

Dennis, Robyn, Anna, Johnny, Philippe, Linda, and Simon (Linda’s brother)

A Sydneytastic high five!

Sun! Sweet glorious sun!

Welcome to Sydney!

We were greeted at Sydney airport with two things we were looking forward to: a sunny day and Bert, our friend Linda’s dad, who picked us up and gave us a scenic tour of Sydney on our way to our friends Philippe and Linda’s flat at Manly Beach.  We have heard a lot of good things about Sydney and the harbor, and the city earns its title as the Harbour City.  There is just soo much waterfront space, and just enough hills for fantastic views all over the city.

View from Philippe and Linda’s flat
When we got to Manly we dropped our thing (took quick showers to clean the airplane smell off) and hit the beach!  Traveling to the opposite hemisphere in the middle of your hometown’s winter never gets old.  There is something pretty fantastic about hopping on a plane and getting off in a completely different season – especially when you are leaving winter greys for long summer days!

The next day we took the ferry into central Sydney to explore some of the sights we viewed on our driving tour the day before on foot. Another thing we really like about Sydney is how friendly the people are!  The guy next to us on the ferry noticed we were tourists (snapping a few too many pictures??) and gave us some fantastic historical information about the city and the sights we passed along our way through the harbor (did you know the second national park in the world was founded in Sydney Harbour, about 10 years after Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming?  Neither did we!)

View of the opera house from the Manly ferry
While in the CBD (central business district area) we spent time walking from the ferry terminal, around the harbor towards the botanical gardens.


We found this guy and made fast friends in the botanical gardens

Then we re-traced our steps and walked away back through the CBD to towards the bridge.

The days with the beard were numbered at this point – sunscreen and beards don’t play well together

We finished our day with the Sydney Bridge climb which is a pretty unique experience.  It is exactly how it sounds, a chance to climb to the top of the Sydney bridge.  I can’t think of any other city in the world where they let tourists do that…but rumor has it that someone is working on it for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco!  We’ll see if they get that past the regulators, ha.

Unfortunately no camera’s are allowed (the only personal item you can bring with you are sunglasses and you wear a flight suit thing over your clothes and they strap all your other gear to you so nothing can fall down onto the cars below) so we couldn’t take any pictures, but Philippe was heading home on the ferry while we were climbing and snapped a few of people walking over the bridge.   If this isn’t us we were following behind shortly.



See us at the front leading the group across the bridge???

The bridge climb was very cool – stepping out onto the bridge with a metal grate between you and 200’ then the harbor.  We got to spend 45 minutes at the peak of the bridge for sunset, a very cool way to end our first of three short trips to Sydney!

See you again in February Sydney!