The Gateaux Come For A Visit

Yes, Gateau Man (aka Mike) and his wife (Lianna) came for the weekend last weekend. They'd narrowed down their visit to one of two weekends, either that first weekend with just the two of them (a rare weekend when they had relatives looking after their kids) or the following weekend when all five of them were coming.

I was open to either weekend, but as it turned out, the kid free weekend is the one that ended up working out.

Obviously, as they were on a rare kid free weekend, doing adult stuff was the order of the day, but adult doesn't mean boring!


We had fun eating out, hitting the pubs, visiting the PG Natural History Museum (who knew such a small town had a museum like that) and checking out the rather racially insensitive PG Festival of Lanterns.


We even managed to get a road trip in to check out the Condors - they were there, but didn't do much flying when we were there.

It was a fun weekend and good catching up with the pair of them.

Apologies for yet another Condor post, but...

...today turned out to be the most awesome display of Condors I've yet seen. Absolutely truly amazing. For those of you who've seen them before (Jez and Sally for instance), just think of 10-12 of them flying just over your head as you're standing overlooking the house at Grimes Point, with the birds turning and circling, so that in the end there were birds overhead (and I mean just overhead - it felt like I could almost reach up and touch some of them they were that low) constantly for 6 minutes.

Awesome is an overused word, but I think today defined awesome.

A small selection of photos below (I took 760 photos of Condors today - be scared of the power of the motor drive, be very scared):

It's Condor Tastic

The Monday after the MotoGP weekend, I took the day as a vacation day. Brian and Katy, who were still staying with me, were free too, so we all headed down to the condor spot and got lucky and saw a couple of condors.

Today, I went there again, and bumped into a friend of mine. The two of us (and some others) got to watch a nice display of condors flying around and hanging out in the trees (my friend was there earlier and got to see some of the birds close up too).

Below are some photos from today's exploits, including a bunch of birds feeding on a sea lion carcass (carefully obscured by a flying condor - I have more graphic images on my hard drive).

As an aside, I rode the motorcycle down there - down (and up) from the condor spot was massively windy - however condor spot south (and back north) was awesome - I had a great ride!

Laguna Seca Photos

Yes, a week late posting on the blog, but I've been busy (honest)!

Here are the photos from a fun weekend with the MotoGP in town. Mainly fun 'cos of the folks who were staying with me here at the house - it's always fun with that crowd in the house.

Thursday pre race photos
Friday Afternoon
Saturday - Morning, Afternoon
Sunday - Warm up, Race
Other Photos.